Word: compounders
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...details of their research; they had been advised by patent attorneys to reveal as little as possible until their work was legally protected. The competition extends beyond legal rights. Two weeks after Chu's record-breaking temperature was announced, the Berkeley team independently came up with the same superconducting compound. They immediately mailed a report of their results to Physics Letters, hoping it would be received before Chu's paper was published. Reason: they wanted to establish that they had not merely copied his work...
...seeking a better understanding of why the ceramics become superconductors. Many labs have taken pictures of the materials with electron microscopes, pulsed beams of neutrons, X rays and ultrasound. A team of Bell Labs and Arizona State scientists has produced electron-microscope photographs that show defects in the compound's crystalline structure. Says Team Leader Abbas Ourmazd: "We don't quite understand what role the defects play, but it raises some provocative questions. Is it the perfect material that is superconducting? Or is it the defects? If it turns out that it is the defects, then we will want...
Muller and his colleague, Johannes Georg Bednorz, tinkered with hundreds of different oxide compounds over the next few years, varying quantities and ingredients like alchemists in search of the philosopher's stone. Finally, in December 1985, they came across a compound of barium, lanthanum, copper and oxygen that seemed promising. When Bednorz tested the compound, he was startled to see signs of super-conductivity at an unprecedented 35 K, by far the highest temperature at which anyone had observed the phenomenon. Could this result be correct? Aware of some hastily made superconductivity claims that later could not be reproduced...
...suddenly a nearly moribund branch of physics was the hottest thing around. Large industrial and government laboratories jumped in; so did major universities. At Bell Labs, a team led by Bertram Batlogg and Ceramist Cava had launched their own program of alchemical tinkering. Soon they had manufactured a similar compound that became a superconductor at 38 K, one- upping their archrivals at IBM. "That's when the hysteria started," says Cava. "The place was abuzz with excitement...
Since the Houston lab had special equipment for testing materials at high pressure, Chu wondered what would happen if he pressurized the IBM compound. "Using known theories," he says, "you don't expect the transition temperature to go up rapidly under pressure, but it shot up like a rocket. It suggested to us that there might be some new mechanism involved." That unexpected result, says Chu, played right into what he considers his group's strong suit: "We feel we have an advantage over some other groups because we are not confined to conventional thinking. We think wildly." Chu found...