Paper detail

The conceptual heritage of superconductivity - from Meissner-Ochsenfeld to the Higgs Boson

When first proposed in 1957, the BCS theory for superconductivity, which explained the quasi-totality of its thermodynamic and transport properties, was greeted with great circumspection, before it became the play ground of particle physicists, who largely contributed to understand the deep physics behind this phenomenon. In the course of this undertaking, revolutionizing new concepts in physics were brought to light, such as (i) the "physical significance of the phase" of a quantum mechanical wave function whose role in force-transmitting gauge fields is to control the interaction between elementary particles in a current conserving manner (ii) "spontaneous symmetry breaking" and its related to it collective Nambu-Goldstone modes, which encode the basic symmetry properties of a quantum vacuum and the associated to them conserved quatities, (iii) The "Anderson-Higgs mechanism" and its associated to it, but so far experimentally unconfirmed "Higgs field", which provides the introduction of massive force transmitting gauge fields and ultimately the mass of elementary particles. These concepts were vital in consolidating the standard model for elementary particles and presented the final answer to what distinguishes a superconducting from a non-superconducting state: "electromagnetic gauge symmetry breaking", whatever the microscospic mechanism for that might be. We illustrate here how these concepts gradually emerged, once the basic features, which characterize superconductivity - the Meissner-Ochsenfeld magnetic field screening and the fundamental London equations explaining them in a phenomenological way - were established.