Robert Coleman Richardson (June 26, 1937 – February 19, 2013)[1] was an American experimental physicist whose area of research included sub-millikelvin temperature studies of helium-3.

Richardson, along with David Lee, as senior researchers, and then graduate student Douglas Osheroff, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1972 discovery of the property of superfluidity in helium-3 atoms in the Cornell University Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics.

At the time of his death, he was the Floyd Newman Professor of Physics at Cornell University, although he no longer operated a laboratory.

His past experimental work focused on using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance to study the quantum properties of liquids and solids at extremely low temperatures.

[7] He married Betty Marilyn McCarthy, a fellow physicals PhD student from Duke, on 29 Sep 1962 at the Immaculate Conception Catholic church in Durham, North Carolina.