Olli Lounasmaa

Olli Viktor Lounasmaa
Born	August 20, 1930(1930-08-20) Turku, Finland
Died	December 27, 2002(2002-12-27) (aged 72) Goa, India
Residence	Finland
Nationality	Finnish
Fields	Physicist
Institutions	Helsinki University of Technology
Alma mater	University of Helsinki University of Oxford
Known for	Low temperature physics Magnetoencephalography

Olli Viktor Lounasmaa (August 20, 1930, Turku - December 27, 2002, Goa, India) was a Finnish academician, experimental physicist and neuroscientist. He was known for his research in low temperature physics, especially for experimental proof of the superfluidity of helium-3 and also for his work in the field of magnetoencephalography.

Life and work

Olli Viktor Lounasmaa graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1953. After a short period as senior assistant at the University of Turku, he went on to continue his studies in the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford, where he received his D.Phil. on low temperature physics in 1957. Lounasmaa worked as a visiting scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory in the United States in 1960-1964 before he was invited to the position of professor of engineering physics at the Helsinki University of Technology in 1964.

In 1965, Lounasmaa founded the Low Temperature Laboratory at the Helsinki University of Technology, which he led up to his retirement in 1995. Under Lounasmaa's leadership, the laboratory produced one of the first experimental proofs for the superfluidity of helium-3. For this, Lounasmaa's team received a special mention from the Nobel Prize committee when the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to David M. Lee, Douglas D. Osheroff and Robert C. Richardson for their discovery of helium-3 superfluidity. His other major areas of work were superfluid He-3 in rotation, nuclear magnetism and the applications of superconductors.

In the early 1980s, Lounasmaa decided to start a new field of study and use his laboratory's experience in magnetometry to study magnetic fields created by brain activity. He and his students played a key role in the development of the theory and technology for magnetoencephalography, opening new ways to study the brain. He also co-founded the spinoff companies SHE (in the early 1970s, later Biomagnetic Technologies, inc., then 4-D Neuroimaging) and Neuromag (in 1989, now part of Elekta).

Lounasmaa died on December 27, 2002 in Goa, India during a holiday trip. The official cause of death was drowning, which according to his posthumously released memoirs was believed to have been caused by a cardiac arrest.^[1]

Awards

Olli Lounasmaa was awarded among others the Fritz London Memorial Prize (in 1984), the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (in 1993) and the Kapitsa Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (in 1995). In 1997, Lounasmaa was appointed Academician by the Academy of Finland. He was also a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

External links

• The Low Temperature Laboratory at the Helsinki University of Technology
• Lounasmaa's obituary

References

1. ^ Lounasmaa, O. V. (posthumously edited by Kiti Müller) : Täällä ei näperrellä! Kylmäfyysikon kuumat paikat / Olli V. Lounasmaa (In Finnish) - Olli Lounasmaa's memoirs Helsinki : Suomen tiedeseura , 2008 ISBN 978-951-653-355-4

Persondata
Name	Lounasmaa, Olli
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	August 20, 1930
Place of birth	Turku, Finland
Date of death	December 27, 2002
Place of death	Goa, India