Absolute Hero: Heike Onnes's

Discovery of Superconductors
Turns 100
A century after the discovery of materials that
conduct electricity without resistance, the
applications remain disappointingly limited.
That may be about to change
 THE LEIDEN CRYOGENIC
LABORATORY:
• Built by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and pictured here in 1895, the
Leiden Cryogenic Laboratory was, in the words of science historian
Dirk van Delft, "a profusion of tubes, taps, gas flasks, gas holders,
liquefiers, Dewar flasks, cryostats, clattering pumps and droning
engines, glassblowing and other workshops, instruments and
appliances for scientific research.“
• It was here that on July 10, 1908, Onnes managed to liquefy helium
—at 5 kelvins (about –268 degrees Celsius)—for the first time in
history. That was the lowest temperature ever achieved, and no
other lab would be able to match it until 1923. (The noble gas itself
had only been isolated in 1895, by Scottish chemist William
Ramsay; James Dewar's vacuum flask, aka the thermos bottle, had
been invented in 1892.)
• The building that hosted the lab is now the Leiden Law School
HEIKE KAMERLINGH ONNES:
• Onnes (1853–1926) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in
1913—not for discovering superconductivity but for liquefying
helium. But it was his discovery of the former that made him famous.
• Onnes observed the phenomenon while trying to answer an open
question about electrons.
• At the temperatures of liquid helium, ordinary thermometers would
freeze. Physicists could still measure temperature by measuring the
electrical resistance in metals, based on the empirical observation
that electrical resistance was directly proportional to temperature.
That idea, however, had never been tested close to absolute zero.
• Two competing theories existed for what would happen: Lord Kelvin
had postulated that electrons in a metal would "freeze," and thus
stop moving. The conductor would therefore become an insulator.
German theorist Paul Drude instead maintained that electrons
inside a metal acted like a gas, so that resistance would gradually
and linearly approach zero.
• As Onnes showed, neither theory was correct.
THE CRYOGENIC APPARATUS:
• This diagram details
the system of
cryogenic pumps and
flasks built by Onnes
and his assistant
Gerrit Jan Flim; the
capillaries holding
mercury were made
by the lab's master
glassblower Oskar
Kesselring.
 WHEN RESISTANCE
DISAPPEARED:
• This graph of how
electrical resistance
(vertical axis)
depends on
temperature
(horizontal axis)
shows the resistance
of mercury suddenly
dropping to zero at
around 3 K.
ONNES'S LOST NOTEBOOK:
• "Mercury practically zero." Onnes wrote those words in his notebook
at 4 P.M. on April 8, 1911, when his assistant Gilles Holst reported
that at the temperature of 3 K the resistance in mercury dropped so
low it could no longer be measured. The historic remark is on the
right-hand side, seventh line from the bottom, and reads in Dutch:
"Kwik nagenoeg nul."
• This notebook, numbered 56, was mislabeled as being from 1910
instead of 1911, and was scribbled in to the point that the
handwriting is almost incomprehensible. So, for many decades,
historians thought that the 1911 notebook recording the great
discovery had been lost. But in October 2009 recently retired
physicist Peter Kes of the University of Leiden began a painstaking
study of Onnes's notebooks and realized notebook 56 ended by
recording the visit of Marie Curie to the lab. Curie had visited in July
1911, which means that the notebook could not have been from the
year before. "The deciphering was quite a job," Kes recalls.
• The discovery cleared various misconceptions concerning
superconductivity's discovery and, in particular, that it had
happened by accident because a lab technician had fallen asleep.
 CRACKING THE PUZZLE:
• In 1957 the U.S. physicists John Bardeen (who had already shared
a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the transistor), Leon Neil Cooper
and John Robert Schrieffer finally cracked the puzzle of
superconductivity—a goal that had eluded minds of the caliber of
Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Richard Feynman. Their
theory became known by the first letters of their last names—BCS
theory—and earned them a Nobel Prize in Physics 1972.
• In metals atoms donate one of more of their electrons to a common
pool of "conduction electrons". The positively charged ions left
behind form a regular crystal lattice. When electrons collide with the
ions, they may lose energy, which is why ordinary conductors
dissipate heat.
• Graham P. Collins described BCS theory in the August 2009 issue
of Scientific American. When an electron moves inside the metal its
negative charge, Collins wrote, "tugs on the metal's ions" and
"leaves in its wake a temporary region of distorted lattice"; this
distortion travels along the lattice and is, in essence, a quantum of
mechanical vibration. Because the distorted region has a slightly
increased density of positive charge, a second electron may
experience a small attractive force toward it.
 CRACKING THE PUZZLE:
• In a superconducting
state, when the material
is cold enough, two
electrons can then travel
close together—despite
having like charges—and
form a common quantum
state of twice the charge,
called a Cooper pair.
These double particles in
turn form wavelike
quantum states that can
travel along the material
unimpeded.
THE WOODSTOCK OF PHYSICS:
• Physicists crammed into a hastily arranged session at a 1987
meeting of the American Physical Society—a session that went on
until 3:15 A.M. the next morning and became known as the
"Woodstock of physics". Outside, hundreds of others watched on
closed-circuit TV screens.
• The excitement, rather unusual for a physics meeting, was
justifiable. Just a few months before, IBM researchers Karl Müller
and Johannes Bednorz had unexpectedly discovered that family of
ceramic materials, called cuprates, became superconducting at
higher temperatures than the 30 K that physicists believed was the
limit for superconductivity. All of a sudden it seemed that the sky
was the limit. Whereas the BCS seemed to require low
temperatures, perhaps this new phenomenon could extend even to
room temperature.
• Researchers soon realized that the cuprates did not obey BCS
theory. To this day, there is no conclusive explanation for how high-
temperature superconductors work: This question remains one of
the holy grails of theoretical physics. Müller and Bednorz received
the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987.
 THE IRON AGE OF
SUPERCONDUCTORS 
• In 2006 Hideo Hosono (pictured) and his team at
the Tokyo Institute of Technology were trying to
create new materials for flat-panel displays when
they stumbled on an entirely new kind of high-
temperature superconductor. Their material,
made of iron, oxygen, phosphorus and the rare
element lanthanum, created a buzz in physics
circles and sparked an explosion in research. No
one expected an iron compound could be
superconducting, because iron is magnetic and
magnetic fields were thought to be incompatible
with superconductivity.