Superconductivity at 100; High-Tc at 25 (and both still young and sprightly)
On April 8th 2011, which we believe is exactly the 100th anniversary of the discovery of superconductivity by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Gilles Holst, we celebrated with a special cake: see the image below.
Celebrating with cake!
This was occasion for a number of punning comments and questions:
- “I have no resistance to cake!”
- “My strong coupling to cake is a High-Tea (c) phenomenon.”
- "Does it contain super currants?"
[A: Yes - they were soaked in a super fluid - rum. By the way, it was an extreme type-II super cake, because the currants were distributed throughout the bulk.] - "Does it contain pears?"
[A: No; nor does it contain Bose condensed milk.] - "Is it a Butter-Chocolate-Sugar supercake? (Maybe this depends on Tc, the cooking temperature?)"
[A: It was a BCS-FE super cake, with a Tc of gas mark 4] - "I suppose that before reaching Tc the supercake was in the mixed state."
On a slightly more serious note, the IOP publication Physics World had a special issue celebrating
these anniversaries.
Click here to see Ted Forgan’s article about the High-Tc story in this issue.