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-pres…
superconductivity
7 posts
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'…
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 reaso…
The imperfection of strontium titanate
When you squeeze some crystals, you distort their lattice of atoms just enough to separate a pair of charged particles and that in turn gives rise to a voltage. Such materials are called piezoelectric…
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.…
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…
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 bo…