WI: Early high-temperature superconductors?

Lately, the Physics Department here has been having a series of colloquia on iron-based superconductors The thing about these superconductors is that they're relatively simple (compared to the cuprates, at least), yet have reasonably high critical temperatures (as high as 50K for some varieties). Given their simplicity I immediately asked the question: why couldn't they have been discovered sooner? It seems at least plausible that some cryogenic physicist or chemist in the early part of the century might play with iron arsenide and find out that it's superconducting.

That might lead to some interesting effects in physics. BCS theory (which explains the behavior of low-temperature superconductors) might be delayed or butterflied, since it doesn't explain the behavior of high-temperature superconductors like the FeAs types. This could have a number of further effects, since IIRC BCS was one of the first theories to propose that quantum effects could have significant visible effects. It could also lead to an earlier discovery of the cuprates, especially if the rare-earth varieties of the FeAs materials are discovered earlier. Anyone think of anything else that might happen?
 

Cook

Banned
Do you have any links for these, sounds interesting?

I’m not sure but I think it was Douglas Adams that said all the really great discoveries and inventions are greeted by someone saying; “oh Anyone could have thought of that, it’s obvious!”

 
Do you have any links for these, sounds interesting?

I’m not sure but I think it was Douglas Adams that said all the really great discoveries and inventions are greeted by someone saying; “oh Anyone could have thought of that, it’s obvious!”


Well, if you do an arXiv search, you'll find more papers about the things than you'll probably care to read :p (406 total). Aside from that, wiki has what seems like a decent article about them.

The thing is, the simple (= easy for someone to discover) Fe superconductors have rather low transition temperatures, around the same temperature as a number of compounds discovered OTL before the true HTSCs, and the best way to increase that (that anyone knows about so far, since this is a very new area!) is to dope with rare earths, which are, IIRC, rather rare at the time. Still, since they're not explicable via BCS (they use a different mechanism, currently unknown), and can be pushed to much higher temperatures than the "low-temperature" ones, there may be some scope for advancement. In particular, as I mentioned before, it would be interesting if this advanced the discovery of the cuprates some years (or even decades, if they figure out the rare-earth doping).
 
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