Josephson, Brian David, 1940–, British physicist, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1964. After several postdoctoral appointments, he joined the faculty at Cambridge in 1974. Josephson was co-recipient, with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever, of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a super current through a tunnel barrier. Stimulated by Giaever's work on electron tunneling in superconductors, Josephson began to work on the phenomenon, leading to his prediction of the so-called Josephson effect in 1962. The effect, which describes current flow across two weakly coupled superconductors separated by a thin insulating barrier, has important applications in quantum-mechanical circuits.
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