At the end of 2000 superconductivity in metal alloys and compounds appeared to remain trapped by a glass ceiling. Over the previous 10 years the temperature at which certain oxide-based compounds - such as bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide and mercury barium calcium copper oxide - lost their resistance to electric current had soared to well over 100 K. Meanwhile, the transition temperature, Tc, for carbon-based materials, including alkali-doped carbon-60 compounds, had risen close to the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (77 K). During the same period, however, the superconducting transition temperature of intermetallic compounds (materials made solely of metals and metal-like elements) remained close to 20 K - as it had been since the mid-1960s.
By February 2001 everything had totally changed. It was as if a firecracker had gone off in the tidy little ant hill of superconductivity research. For the first few months of 2001, groups all over the world raced to understand the properties of a new intermetallic superconductor. The substance that everyone was scrambling to buy or make, the substance that was causing this grand commotion, was magnesium diboride (MgB2). This seemingly innocuous binary compound, which had been present in many labs for over half a century, had been discovered to superconduct just below 40 K.
Even though we already know an amazing amount about MgB2, our knowledge of superconductivity in this compound is only one year old. There is therefore the very real potential to improve its critical properties. In a similar vein, it is almost certain that our understanding of this extreme example of intermetallic superconductivity will greatly improve over the next few years and may even reveal other extreme superconductors.
In the January issue of Physics World, Paul C Canfield of Iowa State University and the Ames Laboratory and Sergey L Bud'ko of the Ames Laboratory explain why MgB2 has everything that could have been hoped for from an intermetallic superconductor.