THREE US scientists whose work spurred on colleagues seeking to unlock the mysteries of the origin of the universe have been awarded the 1996 Nobel Physics Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said yesterday.
Dr David Lee, Dr Douglas Osheroff and Dr Robert Richardson won the prize for a quantum physics discovery about the way the isotope helium-3 behaves when extremely cold. The academy said the prize was awarded for "their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3", a breakthrough in low temperature physics made in the early 1970s at New York's Cornell University.
Dr Lee, born in 1931 in Rye, New York State, and Dr Richardson, born in 1937 in Washington DC, both work in Cornell University's Department of Physics. Dr Osheroff, born in Aberdeen, Washington State, in 1945, works at the Department of Physics at California's Stanford University.
The academy said the three men discovered that the helium isotope helium-3 can be made stiperfluid at a temperature only about two thousandths of a degree above absolute zero.
One application of the three Americans' work has been to test a theory on how cosmic strings can be formed in the universe.
"These immense hypothetical objects, which are thought possibly to have been important for the forming of galaxies, can have arisen as a consequence of the rapid phase transitions believed to have taken place a fraction of a second after the Big Bang," the Swedish scientific group said.
Superfluidity is a scientific for when a liquid is made so cold it loses all its usual molecular patterns shortly before it reaches the stage of absolute zero, minus 273.1,5 degrees Celsius.
When a liquid becomes superfluid its atoms lose all their randomness the liquid can overflow a cup or flow out through a very small hole and exhibit a whole range of bizarre characteristics.
Meanwhile Britain's Sir Harold Kroto said he was "totally overwhelmed" by the news he had won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his discovery of new forms of carbon.
He shares the prize with two US scientists, Rice University chemists Dr Robert Curl and Dr Richard Smalley.
Also yesterday observers speculated that Mr Richard Holbrooke, the US architect of Bosnia's peace treaty, is a leading candidate for the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize to be announced tomorrow by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Other names mentioned as front runners in Oslo include the jailed Chinese dissident, Wei Jingsheng, and former US president Jimmy Carter.
If the committee decides to reward an organisation the Salvation Army or Medecins sans Frontieres could win.