The Notebook of Kamerlingh Onnes and the Discovery of Superconductivity

Peter Kes

Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory, Leiden University
POB 9504, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
E-mail: Kes@Physics.LeidenUniv.nl 

This is my lecture presentation at the Superconductivity Centennial Symposium in Leiden, The Netherlands, held on April 8th, 2011.  I felt that after already publishing with Dirk van Delft on the notebook of Kamerlingh Onnes and the discovery of superconductivity in Physics Today (see RN16), it will be more appropriate to just present the slides I used and provide comments to these.  The analysis of Onnes’s notebooks made it possible to rectify apocryphal tales on how the superconductivity was discovered, but the real story is perhaps even more fascinating.  This slide presentation complements the lecture by Dirk van Delft, which was published in ESNF as paper RN19.

Full Text, PDF

Received July 22, 2011; accepted July 26, 2011.  Reference No. RN21-S, Categories 2, 5, 6, 13.