A New Conception of Supraconductivity

Abstract

IN the past few years, physicists have been much engaged by the phenomenon of supraconductivity. It is well known that various metals, when cooled below a certain very low temperature, characteristic of the metal in question, show the strange property of conducting electricity apparently without offering any resistance to the current. This curious phenomenon seems to contradict all our customary conceptions in physics. Particularly striking was the experiment of Kamerlingh Onnes and Tuyn, in which a current was induced in a supraconducting ring of lead and was found to persist there without any measurable decrease for many hours—so long as the low temperature could be maintained. This experiment seems to present a unique case of motion without any friction, whilst we have been accustomed to see in every mechanism an occasion for dissipation of kinetic energy into heat. In 1937, Fritz London introduced his ‘New Conception of Supraconductivity’ to the readers of Nature. He proposed “representing all supracurrents realizable in a simply connected supraconductor by even one single electronic state”. Some 20 years later, Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer built on this idea to produce the ‘BCS theory’ of superconductivity, which is based on a correlated, ‘single-state’ system of electron pairs. In 1938, London himself applied a similar idea to the phenomenon of superfluidity, suggesting that it may be a manifestation of bosonic condensation of atoms [see Nature 141, 643–644 & Nature 141 (1938), 913 (1938)].