TY - JOUR

T1 - Superconductivity

T2 - the path of least resistance to the future

AU - Mercer, William

AU - Pashkin, Yuri

PY - 2024/1/2

Y1 - 2024/1/2

N2 - The accidental discovery of mercury’s zero resistance at temperatures lower than 4.2 K which took place in 1911 by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in his laboratory at the University of Leiden, appeared to be one of the greatest breakthroughs of physics of all time. It has led to the creation of an entirely new field within physics called superconductivity; this attracted many of the finest minds in physics whose work in this area produced no less than six Nobel Prizes to date. Zero resistance, together with the expulsion of magnetic fields which was discovered many years later, are the two unique and intriguing properties of superconductors which puzzled scientists’ brains for a proper theoretical explanation of the observed phenomena. However in 1935, the phe-nomenological theory proposed by Fritz and Heinz London (known as the London theory) was the first success in the field, which was followed in the 1950s by another phenomenological theory put forward by Vitaly Ginzburg and Lev Landau. Despite this, a satisfactory microscopic theory for super-conductivity had to wait until 1957 when John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer proposed their theory, which was nicknamed the BCS theory in their honour.The more recent discovery of the cuprate high temperature superconductors (HTS) in 1986 gave a new momentum to the field and intensified the search for room temperature superconductors which continues to this day. While this quest is under way, and new theories of superconductivity are being developed, physicists, material scientists and engineers are using superconductors to establish new technologies and build machines, devices and tools with unprecedented properties. Today superconductors are widely used in healthcare, particle accelerators, ultrasensitive instrumentation and microwave engineering and they are being developed for use in many other areas as well. In this review, we will trace the history of superconductors and provide a brief overview into some of the recent applications of superconductivity.

AB - The accidental discovery of mercury’s zero resistance at temperatures lower than 4.2 K which took place in 1911 by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in his laboratory at the University of Leiden, appeared to be one of the greatest breakthroughs of physics of all time. It has led to the creation of an entirely new field within physics called superconductivity; this attracted many of the finest minds in physics whose work in this area produced no less than six Nobel Prizes to date. Zero resistance, together with the expulsion of magnetic fields which was discovered many years later, are the two unique and intriguing properties of superconductors which puzzled scientists’ brains for a proper theoretical explanation of the observed phenomena. However in 1935, the phe-nomenological theory proposed by Fritz and Heinz London (known as the London theory) was the first success in the field, which was followed in the 1950s by another phenomenological theory put forward by Vitaly Ginzburg and Lev Landau. Despite this, a satisfactory microscopic theory for super-conductivity had to wait until 1957 when John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer proposed their theory, which was nicknamed the BCS theory in their honour.The more recent discovery of the cuprate high temperature superconductors (HTS) in 1986 gave a new momentum to the field and intensified the search for room temperature superconductors which continues to this day. While this quest is under way, and new theories of superconductivity are being developed, physicists, material scientists and engineers are using superconductors to establish new technologies and build machines, devices and tools with unprecedented properties. Today superconductors are widely used in healthcare, particle accelerators, ultrasensitive instrumentation and microwave engineering and they are being developed for use in many other areas as well. In this review, we will trace the history of superconductors and provide a brief overview into some of the recent applications of superconductivity.

KW - BCS theory

KW - Ginzburg–Landau theory

KW - London theory

KW - Meissner effect

KW - SQUID

KW - Zero electrical resistance

KW - flux quantisation

KW - high-temperature superconductivity

KW - josephson effect

KW - superconducting qubit

KW - superconductive electronics

U2 - 10.1080/00107514.2023.2259654

DO - 10.1080/00107514.2023.2259654

M3 - Review article

VL - 64

SP - 19

EP - 46

JO - Contemporary Physics

JF - Contemporary Physics

SN - 0010-7514

IS - 1

ER -