Finally, phone rings for 3 Nobel recipients

By Douglas Birch, Baltimore Sun, 10/8/2003

MOSCOW -- Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics yesterday for their theories on the behavior of very cold atoms -- work that has helped revolutionize medical treatment and could one day lead to vastly more efficient electrical devices.

Two of the researchers, both native Russians, explained the working of superconductivity, where certain materials chilled to extremely low temperatures lose resistance to electric currents.

The third physicist, born in Great Britain, solved the mystery of superfluidity, the quirky behavior of helium chilled to near absolute zero, or minus 459.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Alexei A. Abrikosov, 75, Anthony J. Leggett, 65, and Vitaly L. Ginzburg, 87. Abrikosov is a Russian and American citizen based at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois; Leggett is a British and American citizen based at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and Ginzburg is a Russian based at the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow.

Each winner will receive one-third of the $1.3 million prize -- $433,000 before taxes. Abrikosov, who emigrated to the United States in 1991, said he might use the money to retire.

Every year for the past 30 years Ginzburg, a $90-a-month professor, has been nominated for the scientific world's most coveted prize, based on work that culminated in a groundbreaking paper on superconductivity published in 1950. "I was absolutely sure I wouldn't receive it," he said. Then the phone rang yesterday in his narrow office at the institute, its 9-foot-high bookshelves crammed with papers and journals.

The caller said Ginzburg had finally won, but the scientist couldn't quite believe it. "Are you joking, by chance?" he said. Finally persuaded, Ginzburg called his wife. But he told no one else, hoping not to create a stir.

By yesterday afternoon, the professor was surrounded by colleagues and journalists who crowded one of the hallways of the institute, with its scuffed wooden floors and dim fluorescent lights.

Abrikosov, at the Argonne National Laboratory, built on Ginzburg's work. He explained the behavior of a type of superconductor that works even in the presence of a strong magnetic field, in papers published while he was still at the Institute for Physical Problems in Moscow in the late 1950s.

Abrikosov told reporters that all three scientists were united by the fact that their groundbreaking work was ignored by the Swedish academy for so long. "Now the Nobel committee probably decided to correct that thing, and to give us all three old scientists the Nobel prize," he said from his home in Lemon, Ill.

Superconducting magnets are already used in a variety of devices, including the magnetic resonance imaging devices, called MRI machines. And scientists continue to hunt for a room-temperature superconductor. If one is developed, they might make wire as thin as a human hair that could carry a household's worth of electricity.

"Although these theories were formulated in the 1950s, they have gained renewed importance in the rapid development of materials with completely new properties," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement yesterday.

The third portion of the prize went to Leggett at the University of Illinois. In the 1970s he published papers on superfluid helium.