Abstract
Electricity is carried through metallic wires, called conductors. In the process, electrons move through metallic conductors that offer resistance (the value depends on the particular metal used), to the passage of electrons. This leads to the production of heat and loss of energy. This heating process is utilised in many electrical devices. However, for transmission of electrical energy from the power plants to the user and in many other applications, it would be a great boon if no energy was lost to resistance. The discovery of superconductivity by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911 at Leiden, offered a glimmer of hope to make this dream possible. It was a discovery totally unexpected at that time, and we owe this discovery to the painstaking and methodical investigations of Onnes–first to produce very low temperatures, and then measure properties of materials at these freezing temperatures.
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Amit Roy is currently at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre after working at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Inter-University Accelerator Centre. His research interests are in nuclear, atomic, and accelerator physics.
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Roy, A. Story of superconductivity. Reson 22, 461–473 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-017-0489-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-017-0489-7