In a superconductor, single-particle excitations created by adding or removing an electron require a minimum energy given by the absolute value | | of the superconducting energy gap . An applied magnetic field enters a type II superconductor in the form of Abrikosov vortices. Around the core of each vortex the super current flows with a circulation equal to h. For conventional superconductors the cores are believed to contain only “normal” metallic electrons. These potentially offer sources of damping for various excitations. The gap may depend on the wavevector k of the added or removed particle, and in the vortex state, on its position. Indeed, according to Ginzburg–Landau theory, is proportional to the superconducting order parameter, which acquires a position-dependent phase, the “winding phase,” that changes by 2π around any closed path that winds once around a vortex. In 1961, Abrikosov and Falkovskii [1] predicted that electronic Raman scattering at small momentum transfer from a clean BCS superconductor should reveal the gap as a discontinuous sharp rise to a peak at an energy transfer equal to twice the gap, i.e. at 2 . Sometimes referred to as a “pair-breaking peak,” the 2 feature results from the creation during the lightscattering process of an electron–hole pair, each part of which requires a minimum energy of [2]. Subsequent theoretical work was based on Greens function approaches. See [3–5] for examples. This paper presents a brief survey of the few experiments that probed the effect of a magnetic field