MaNEP: Superconductivity

MaNEP is celebrating 100 years of Superconductivity.

In April 1911, the Dutchman, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (Nobel Prize for Physics 1913) and his student Gilles Host made the most important discovery of their careers.  By studying the electrical resistance of mercury, they discovered that this resistance fell sharply when lowering the temperature to a temperature close to absolute zero (-273 °C)!  This mysterious discovery opened up new horizons in physics research.  While research advanced, it remained mostly within the confines of the physics laboratory until the great breakthrough of 1986 when German scientist, George Johannes Bednorz and Swiss scientist, Karl Alex Müller (in the research laboratories of IBM in Zurich, Rüschlikon) discovered superconductors with a much higher critical temperature.  This resulted in them being awarded the Nobel Prize just one year later.
They discovered a matter that becomes a superconductor at -238°C, whereas the previous record held since 1973 was at -249.8°C for niobium germanium.  This was followed a few months later by other researchers announcing that similar compounds were super-connecting at -180°C.  This was a very important step because these substances can now be cooled with liquid nitrogen (-196°C), which up until then were cooled with the more expensive liquid helium (-269°C).
Despite 100 years of research, researchers in superconductivity are still kept in suspense including those of many of the researchers in the MaNEP National Centre for Research on new materials with exceptional properties.