In 1911, a couple of millennia after the discovery of the novel properties of ferromagnetic metals, superconductivity was discovered by Kamerlingh Onnes. The field started to progress more rapidly after 1933, the year when Meissner and Ochsenfeld discovered that a superconductor expelled a magnetic field. Conversely, we later discovered that a sufficiently large magnetic field will suppress superconductivity.
From this brief and early history of magnetism and superconductivity, it would appear that the two effects might never exist together. But Gilbert Lonzarich of Cambridge University and co-workers at Cambridge, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the CEA laboratory in Grenoble, France (S Saxena et al. 2000 Nature 406 587) have recently discovered the first material where metallic ferromagnetism and superconductivity co-exist.
In the October issue of Physics World, Kevin S Bedell of Boston College, USA, asks the million-dollar question: why did it take so long for these phases to get together?