William Martin Fairbank dies (1919-1989)
American physicist William Fairbank died last September 30 as a result of the heart attack he suffered during jogging. Fairbank has been the brightest American experimental physicist of its generation.
He has worked in low-temperature physics, mainly with liquid helium and superconductivity. He was very competent in applying low-temperature techniques to different branches of physics, such as elementary particles, gravitational waves and general relativity.
In the early years he pioneered low-temperature studies on the nature of the 4He and 3He isotopes. In 1954 it was the first time he and his companions managed to measure the Fermi-Dirac character of 3He at temperatures below 0.25 K of EMN. Two years later the phase division of 4He and 3He was discovered at temperatures below 0.8 K.
However, Fairbank's biggest contribution has been to find the quantization of the magnetic flow of a superconducting ring. Through this experiment he checked the quantum character of superconductivity and the existence of electron pairings in superconductive state.
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