Superconductivity: Discoveries and Discoverers

The Ginzburg-Landau Theory of Superconductivity.- Magnetic Structure of Type II Superconductors.- The Microscopic Theory of Superconductivity.- The Microscopic Theory of Superconductivity.- Single Particle Tunnelling: Confirming the BCS-Theory.- Cooper Pair Tunnelling: The Josephson Effects.- Superconductivity from a Broader Perspective.- The Orsay Group on Superconductivity.- Discovery of Cuprate Superconductors.- Discovery of Cuprate Superconductors.

The author is a condensed matter physicist educated at University of Oslo. After receiving his Master degree in 1964 he spent two years as a NATO Research Fellow and then a research associate at University of Maryland 1965-67. He then held a fellowship from the Research Council of Norway at University of Oslo and finished his PhD there in 1972. He joined The Norwegian Institute of Technology, University of Trondheim in 1970, since 1972 as an associate professor, and since 1980 as full professor of physics. Since 1996 the university is named The Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The author is presently professor emeritus there.

Kristian Fossheim has spent several years at leading international laboratories in Europe, in the USA and in Japan. In 1973 and 1975 he spent 3 months as a visiting scientist at IBM Research Laboratory, Rüschlikon near Zurich, after which he spent the year 1975-76 at the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, NY, in ateam studying echo and memory phenomena in powder substances . Later, he spent a brief period as a visiting professor at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba and the Superconductivity Research Laboratory in Tokyo in 1990, and then two years at The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Tallahassee, Florida in 1994-95 and in 2000-2001.

The author started his research in superconductivity using ultrasound at Maryland already in 1965, in particular studying the phase transition with sub-millidegree resolution. Since 1968, while in Oslo and in Trondheim, he initiated and continued a collaboration with Alex Müller on structural phase transitions and critical phenomena in perovskites, specially SrTiO3. With R Holt he developed ultrasonic phase conjugation as a tool in the study of critical phenomena. He worked on acoustic surface waves, developed an acoustic microscope, and high resolution specific heat instrumentation. With the latter he did the experimental discovery of

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