Tag Archives: superconductivity
Tracking the Meissner effect under pressure
In the last two or three years, groups of scientists from around the world have made several claims that they had discovered a room-temperature superconductor. Many of these claims concerned high-pressure superconductors — materials that superconduct electricity at room temperature … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged diamond anvil cell, flux-pinning, magnetic field, materials science, Meissner effect, nitrogen vacancy centres, optical magnetometry, quantum spin, room-temperature superconductor, superconductivity
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65 years of the BCS theory
Thanks to an arithmetic mistake, I thought 2022 was the 75th anniversary of the invention (or discovery?) of the BCS theory of superconductivity. It’s really the 65th anniversary, but since I’d worked myself up to write about it, I’m going … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm, Science
Tagged BCS theory, Bi-2212, conventional superconductors, Cooper pairs, superconductivity
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Physicists observe long-expected helium superfluid phase
Physicists have reported that they have finally observed helium 3 existing in a long-predicted type of superfluid, called the ß phase. This is an important discovery, if it’s borne out, for reasons that partly have to do with its isotope, helium 4. … Continue reading
Posted in Scicomm
Tagged Anthony Leggett, BCS theory, Cooper pairs, helium 3 A phase, helium 3 P phase, helium 3 ß phase, helium 3 superfluidity, helium 4, helium-3, nematic aerogel, neutron stars, superconductivity, symmetry-breaking, Vladimir Dmitriev
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The science in Netflix’s ‘Spectral’
It’s fun to think about the implications of a film’s antagonists being modelled after a phenomenon I’ve often read/written about but never thought about that way. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Albert Einstein, BCS theory, Bose-Einstein condensate, ceramics, Cooper pair, DARPA, electromagnetic radiation, M1 Abrams tank, Netflix, Quantum mechanics, refractive index, SN Bose, Spectral, superconductivity, superfluidity, UV light, warcraft, wavefunction
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Superconductivity: From Feshbach to Fermi
(This post is continued from this one.) After a bit of searching on Wikipedia, I found that the fundamental philosophical underpinnings of superconductivity were to be found in a statistical concept called the Feshbach resonance. If I had to teach … Continue reading
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Tagged 1-2-3 superconductors, absolute zero, BCS theory, Bose-Einstein condensates, Cooper pairs, crystal lattice, Fermi energy, Fermi-Dirac statistics, Feshbach resonance, Meissner effect, Pauli's exclusion principle, phonons, superconductivity
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Getting started on superconductivity
After the hoopla surrounding and attention on particle physics subsided, I realized that I’d been riding a speeding wagon all the time. All I’d done is used the lead-up to (the search for the Higgs boson) and the climax itself … Continue reading
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Tagged condensed matter physics, Cooper pairs, Electromagnetism, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Large Hadron Collider, Leon Cooper, Lorentz force, superconductivity
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