Twenty-five years ago this week, the physics community got a bit of a shock. A paper in Condensed matter cautiously proclaimed that its authors, based at IBM's Zurich Research Lab had detected "Possible high Tc superconductivity in the Ba-La-Cu-O System." The abstract (which happens to contain a typo) reported a critical temperature of 30 Kelvin. That was only 8K above the previous record holder, but it was the first movement in the area in 13 years, and materials like the one described had been left completely unstudied when it comes to superconductivity.
Excitement quickly built as researchers tried relatives of this compound, and quickly pushed the critical temperature, the point at which superconductivity starts, into the range where the material could superconduct when dipped in liquid nitrogen, which is cheap and easy to obtain. Visions of room-temperature superconductors and a superconducting grid swirled through many people's heads.
It hasn't quite worked out that way. New materials with relatively high critical temperatures were found, but most of them topped out in the same general area of what we already had. Room temperature seems to be an increasingly remote possibility, and the road to commercialization has turned into a long one. To get a better perspective on the state of high temperature superconductors 25 years on, Ars talked with experts from American Superconductor, IBM, and academia.
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