Superconductivity has gone from a rare event to a ground state that pops up in materials once considered improbable, if not impossible. Although we cannot predict its occurrence yet, recent discoveries give us some clues about how to look for new — hopefully more useful — superconducting materials.
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Change history
19 April 2011
In the version of this Commentary originally published, in the second paragraph, 'Cooper' was spelt incorrectly in the first two instances; this has now been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions.
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Acknowledgements
The author's research into superconductivity is supported by the Office of Basic Energy Science, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering under contract number DE-AC02-07CH11358 and by AFOSR-MURI grant #FA9550-09-1-0603.
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Canfield, P. Still alluring and hard to predict at 100. Nature Mater 10, 259–261 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2990
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2990
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