Cornelis Jacobus (Cor) Gorter (14 August 1907, Utrecht – 30 March 1980, Leiden) was a Dutch experimental and theoretical physicist.
[1] After his Abitur in The Hague, Gorter studied physics in Leiden, earning his PhD with the thesis Paramagnetische Eigenschaften von Salzen ("Paramagnetic Properties of Salts")[2] under Wander de Haas.
[5] The "Gorter-model" for a second-order phase transition is from this period of his career, as well as the elucidation of the Senftleben effect (change of viscosity and thermal conductivity of paramagnetic gas in a magnetic field).
The second-order phase transition was for a while controversial, as it seems to require two sheets of the Gibbs free energy to osculate exactly, which is so unlikely as to never occur in practice.
[9] After WWII he worked on liquid helium II and developed the theory which is now known as Coulomb blockade, the increase in electrical resistance in metal films at low temperatures.