Kondo effect by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
If you adda bit of impurities to certain materials, at low temperatures of a few Kelvin their resistivity actually starts increasing if you go below a certain critical temperature.
Figure 1.
Kondo effect graph for gold with added impurities
. Source.
Yates analysis, often referred to as Yates' algorithm or Yates' method, is a statistical technique used for analyzing and understanding the effects of different factors in experiments, especially those involving factorial designs. It is typically associated with the analysis of variance (ANOVA) and response surface methodology.
Video 1.
Superconductor, 4-probe measurement by Frederiksen Scientific A/S (2015)
Source. OK experiment, illustrates the educational kit they sell. No temperature control, just dumps liquid nitrogen into conductor and watches it drop. But not too bad either. The kit sale link is broken (obviously, enterprise stuff), but there are no archives unfortunately. But it must be some High-temperature superconductor
TODO!!! Even this is hard to find! A clean and minimal one! Why! All we can find are shittly levitating YBCO samples in liquid nitrogen! Maybe because liquid helium is expensive?
Video 1.
First 10T Tape Coil by Mark Benz
. Source. Dr. Mark Benz describes the first commercially sold superconducting magnet made by him and colleagues in 1965. The 10 Tesla magnet was made at GE Schenectady and they sold magnets to research facilities world wide before the team formed Intermagnetics General. IGC and Carl Rosner went on to pioneer MRI technology.
Upside: superconducting above 92K, which is above the 77K of liquid nitrogen, and therefore much much cheaper to obtain and maintain than liquid helium.
Downside: it is brittle, so how do you make wires out of it? Still, can already be used in certain circuits, e.g. high temperature SQUID devices.
As of 2023 the most important ones economicaly were:
The main application is magnetic resonance imaging. Both of these are have to be Liquid helium, i.e. they are not "high-temperature superconductor" which is a pain. One big strength they have is that they are metallic, and therefore can made into wires, which is crucial to be able to make electromagnetic coils out of them.
BCS Theory by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Main theory to explain Type I superconductors very successfully.
TODO can someone please just give the final predictions of BCS, and how they compare to experiments, first of all? Then derive them.
High level concepts:
In 1962 Brian Josephson published his inaugural paper predicting the effect as Section "Possible new effects in superconductive tunnelling".
Some golden notes can be found at True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen page 224 and around. Philip W. Anderson commented:
We were all - Josephson, Pippard and myself, as well as various other people who also habitually sat at the Mond tea and participated in the discussions of the next few weeks - very much puzzled by the meaning of the fact that the current depends on the phase
As part of the course Anderson had introduced the concept of broken symmetry in superconductors. Josephson "was fascinated by the idea of broken symmetry, and wondered whether there could be any way of observing it experimentally."
Paper by Philip W. Anderson and John M. Rowell that first (?) experimentally observed the Josephson effect.
TODO understand the graphs in detail.
They used tin-oxide-lead tunnel at 1.5 K. TODO oxide of what? Why two different metals? They say that both films are 200 nm thick, so maybe it is:
   -----+------+------+-----
...  Sn | SnO2 | PbO2 | Pb  ...
   -----+------+------------
          100nm 100nm
A reconstruction of their circuit in Ciro's ASCII art circuit diagram notation TODO:
DC---R_10---X---G
There are not details of the physical construction of course. Reproducibility lol.
If you shine microwave radiation on a Josephson junction, it produces a fixed average voltage that depends only on the frequency of the microwave. TODO how is that done more precisely? How to you produce and inject microwaves into the thing?
It acts therefore as a perfect frequency to voltage converter.
The Wiki page gives the formula: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect#The_inverse_AC_Josephson_effect You get several sinusoidal harmonics, so the output is not a perfect sine. But the infinite sum of the harmonics has a fixed average voltage value.
And en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_voltage_standard#Josephson_effect mentions that the effect is independent of the junction material, physical dimension or temperature.
All of the above, compounded with the fact that we are able to generate microwaves with extremely precise frequency with an atomic clock, makes this phenomenon perfect as a Volt standard, the Josephson voltage standard.
TODO understand how/why it works better.
Josephson phase by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A function defined by the second of the Josephson equations plus initial conditions.
It represents an internal state of the junction.
Magnetic flux quantum by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
TODO is there any relationship between this and the Josephson effect?
This appears to happen to any superconducting loop, because the superconducting wave function has to be continuous.
Video "Superconducting Qubit by NTT SCL (2015)" suggests that anything in between gets cancelled out by a superposition of current in both directions.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
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    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
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    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
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    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
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