Electron‐phonon interactions and superconductivity

JUL 01, 1973

“…the development of the role of electron‐phonon interactions in superconductivity from its beginnings in 1950 up to the present day, both before and after the development of the microscopic theory in 1957.”

DOI: 10.1063/1.3128140

John Bardeen

Our present understanding of superconductivity has arisen from a close interplay of theory and experiment. It would have been very difficult to have arrived at the theory by purely deductive reasoning from the basic equations of quantum mechanics. Even if someone had done so, no one would have believed that such remarkable properties would really occur in nature. But, as you well know, that is not the way it happened; a great deal had been learned about the experimental properties of superconductors, and phenomenological equations had been given to describe many aspects, before the microscopic theory was developed. Some of these have been discussed by Schrieffer and by Cooper in their talks.

References

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The present lecture is based in part on a chapter by the author in Cooperative Phenomena (H. Haken, M. Wagner, eds.), to be published by Springer.
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More about the Authors

John Bardeen. Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois.