Olli Viktor Lounasmaa (20 August 1930 – 27 December 2002) 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.
Contents
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 from 1960 to 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 (since 2010, part of Aalto University) 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 (MEG), 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).