David
Morris Lee (born January 20,
1931) is an American physicist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert C. Richardson and Douglas Osheroff "for
their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3." Lee is professor emeritus of physics at Cornell University and
distinguished professor of physics at Texas A&M University. Lee was born and raised in Rye, New York.[4] His parents, Annette (Franks), a teacher, and
Marvin Lee, an electrical engineer, were children of Jewish immigrants from England and Lithuania. He graduated from Harvard University in
1952 and then joined the U.S. Army for 22 months. After being
discharged from the army, he obtained a master's degree from the University of Connecticut.
In 1955 Lee entered the Ph.D. program at Yale University where he worked under Henry A.
Fairbank in the low-temperature physics group, doing
experimental research on liquid 3He. After graduating from Yale
in 1959, Lee took a job at Cornell University, where
he was responsible for setting up the new Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. Shortly after
arriving at Cornell he met his future wife, Dana, then a PhD student in another
department; the couple went on to have two sons. Lee moved his laboratory from
Cornell to Texas A&M University on
November 16, 2009. In the summer of 2016, Lee lost his wife, Dana,
due to un-diagnosed health issues. The work that led to Lee's Nobel Prize was
performed in the early 1970s. Lee, together with Robert C. Richardson and
graduate student, Doug Osheroff used
a Pomeranchuk cell to
investigate the behaviour of 3He at temperatures
within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero. They discovered
unexpected effects in their measurements, which they eventually explained as
phase transitions to a superfluid phase of 3He. Lee,
Richardson and Osheroff were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996
for this discovery Lee's research also covered a number of other topics in
low-temperature physics, particularly relating to liquid, solid and superfluid
helium (4He, 3He and mixtures of the two).
Particular discoveries include the antiferromagnetic ordering in solid
helium-3, nuclear spin waves in
spin polarized atomic hydrogen gas with Jack H. Freed, and the tri-critical point on the phase
separation curve of liquid 4He-3He, in collaboration
with his Cornell colleague John Reppy. His former research group at Cornell currently
studies impurity-helium solids. As well as the Nobel Prize, other prizes won by
Lee include the 1976 Sir Francis Simon Memorial Prize of the British Institute of Physics and
the 1981 Oliver Buckley Prize of
the American Physical Society along
with Doug Osheroff and Robert Richardson for their superfluid 3He
work. In 1997, Lee received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Lee is a member of the National
Academy of Sciences and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. Lee is currently teaching physics
at Texas A&M University and
continuing his (formerly Cornell-based) research program there as well. Lee is
one of the 20 American recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics to sign a
letter addressed to President George W. Bush in May of 2008, urging him to
"reverse the damage done to basic science research in the Fiscal Year 2008
Omnibus Appropriations Bill" by requesting additional emergency funding
for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the National Science
Foundation, and the National
Institute of Standards and Technology