Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2011
Volume 56, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 21–25, 2011; Dallas, Texas
Session B3: The History of Superconductivity from its Discovery by Kammerlingh Onnes in 1911 |
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Sponsoring Units: FHP Chair: Martin Blume, Brookhaven National Laboratory, APS, Retired Room: Ballroom A3 |
Monday, March 21, 2011 11:15AM - 11:51AM |
B3.00001: Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and the Road to Superconductivity Invited Speaker: The discovery of superconductivity on 8 April 1911 came as a big surprise. It was stumbled upon in the Leiden cryogenic laboratory of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in a moment of serendipity. Three years before, the liquefaction of helium on the other hand had been the culmination of a long battle with nature. It was a meticulously prepared operation, ``big science'' in its first appearance. Until recently, careless notebook entries by Kamerlingh Onnes and his terrible handwriting had hindered a complete view to the road to superconductivity. Even a date of the fascinating discovery was lacking. How did the discovery fit into the Leiden research program? What about the research effort Kamerlingh Onnes had to put in to be sure he had found superconductivity rather than a short-circuit? What about superfluidity? Once the right interpretation of the notebooks is clear, the real story can be told. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, March 21, 2011 11:51AM - 12:27PM |
B3.00002: From the Meissner Effect to the Isotope Effect: Precursors to the Microscopic Theory of Superconductivity Invited Speaker: After the discovery by Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911 of the low temperature disappearance of resistance in mercury to a state of perfect conductivity, there was a long period of more than two decades before there was a major experimental advance. In 1933, Meissner and Ochsenfeld discovered that a superconductor is not only a perfect conductor but in addition it is a perfect diamagnet. In 1935 F. and H. London presented a phenomenological understanding of the electromagnetic properties of the superconducting state, which included the London penetration depth for applied magnetic fields and later introduced the concept of a ``stiffness'' of the superconducting wave function. In 1950, Ginzburg and Landau developed a phenomenological theory for the superconducting state using general thermodynamic arguments.In the same year, Maxwell, and Serin et.al discovered the Isotope Effect which indicated that the electron-phonon~interaction would play an important role in the theory of superconductivity. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, March 21, 2011 12:27PM - 1:03PM |
B3.00003: BCS: 50 Years Invited Speaker: The road to and from BCS: This talk was presented before an audience at Brown University on December 10th, 2010. The recording of the talk will be shown at the session in Dallas, as Professor Cooper will not be able to be present. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, March 21, 2011 1:03PM - 1:39PM |
B3.00004: Giaever, Nb3Sn, and Josephson Invited Speaker: The late 1950s and 1960s were times of remarkable progress in both the understanding and utilization of superconductivity. The majority of today's applications can be traced to key scientific advances made during a period of less than a decade, and the majority of those advances were made in the industrial research laboratories of the United States. As examples, in this talk I will mention the measurement of the specific heat and the critical current of Nb3Sn in high magnetic fields, the discovery by Giaever of tunneling between metal films and his direct observation of the superconducting energy gap, the understanding of strong coupling superconductors, leading to the development of tunneling spectroscopy of the electron-phonon pairing interaction, and the prediction by Josephson of pair tunneling. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, March 21, 2011 1:39PM - 2:15PM |
B3.00005: The arrival of high temperature superconductors Invited Speaker: The attainment of high temperature superconductivity has been considered a major advancement of modern science. It was the seminal discovery of the first cuprate high temperature superconductor, the Ba-doped La$_{2}$CuO$_{4}$, with a $T_{c}$ of 35 K in 1986 by Alex M\"{u}ller and George Bednorz of IBM Zurich Lab,\footnote{J. G. Bednorz and K. A. M\"{u}ller, Z. Phys. B 64, 189 (1986).} who were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1987, that ushered in the era of cuprate high temperature superconductivity. It was the first liquid nitrogen high temperature superconductor, YBa$_{2}$Cu$_{3}$O$_{7}$ with a $T_{c}$ of 93 K discovered in 1987 by Paul C. W. Chu, Maw-Kuen Wu and colleagues in the respective groups at the University of Houston and the University of Alabama at Huntsville\footnote{M. K. Wu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 58, 908 (1987).} that heralded the new era of high temperature superconductivity, drastically changing the psyche of superconductivity research and bringing superconductivity applications a giant step closer to reality. In the ensuing years, many high temperature superconductors have been found, leading to the current record $T_{c}$ of 134 K which was observed by A. Schilling et al.\footnote{A. Schilling et al., Nature 363, 56 (1993).} of ETH in 1993 in HgBa$_{2}$Ca$_{2}$Cu$_{3}$O$_{9-\delta}$ at ambient and later raised to 164 K under 30 GPa by L. Gao et al.\footnote{L. Gao et al., Phys. Rev. B 50, 4260(R) (1994).} In the present talk, I shall briefly recall a few events leading to and during the arrival of high temperature superconductivity. The prospects for future superconductors with higher $T_{c}$ will also be discussed. [Preview Abstract] |
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