Neon-Fox-News: Small Country - Big Ideas #07

For 75 years, superconductivity is a laboratory curiosity with a brutal catch. Since Heike Kamerlingh Onnes first sees electrical resistance vanish in frozen mercury in 1911, every known superconductor works only within a few degrees of absolute zero. By 1973, the record stands at just 23 kelvin, and theory suggests nothing much above 30 is possible. Most physicists consider the field finished.

Karl Alexander Müller disagrees. A veteran physicist at IBM's research lab in Rüschlikon, near Zurich, he has spent years studying oxide ceramics, materials that normally don't conduct electricity at all. In 1983, he and a young German colleague, Georg Bednorz, begin testing one oxide after another, hunting for the unlikely.

It's a risky bet. Metals are the proven route to superconductivity, and ceramics are the last place a serious researcher would look. Bednorz works on the project largely in his spare time, and the two keep their efforts quiet to avoid ridicule.

Then, in early 1986, a compound of lanthanum, barium, copper, and oxygen shows resistance dropping sharply at around 35 kelvin, far above the supposed ceiling. They submit their paper that spring, with a cautious title that includes the word "possible." Hardly anyone notices at first.

That changes within months. Labs in Tokyo, Houston, and elsewhere replicate the result, and a global race erupts. In early 1987, a team led by Paul Chu in Houston pushes the temperature to 93 kelvin, above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. Superconductivity no longer needs expensive liquid helium, but only a cheap coolant. At the American Physical Society meeting in New York that March, thousands of physicists crowd into an overflow session that is remembered as the "Woodstock of Physics."

In 1987, Müller and Bednorz receive the Nobel Prize in Physics, among the fastest recognitions in the prize's history, coming just a year after their discovery. Researchers in Zurich later help push the record higher, and mercury-based ceramics eventually superconduct near 135 kelvin at ambient pressure.

The dream of room-temperature superconductivity remains unfulfilled. But the materials have already found real uses, from powerful magnets to power cables and experimental fusion reactors.

A doubted idea, an after-hours experiment, and a Swiss lab that dared to look in the wrong place: together, they cracked open one of physics' most stubborn barriers.

Thank you for your attention. Stay tuned for the next episode of Neon-Fox-News.