Research Into High Temperature Superconductivity Dying Out

As reported in PhysicsWeb, the number of papers in the high temperature (Ts) superconductivity field have been gradually declining since peaking in 1990; and, given the current trend, the field may altogether disappear by 2015, if a major discovery is not made.

This stark prediction for a once career-making field was determined by examining "the number of papers listed in the INSPEC and Chemical Abstracts Service databases with words like superconductivity or superconductor used in the title or listed as keywords." "By plotting these as a function of time, they found that the numbers shot up rapidly in the late 1980s," following the 1986 discovery of a high Ts superconductor by Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller at IBM's Zurich lab. "The numbers in the INSPEC database reached a peak of about 8500 a year in 1990, but have been slowly falling and now stand at about 4400." By performing a linear fit to the data after 1990, they estimate that the number of papers will reach zero in the 2010-2015 time frame. The researchers blame the decline "on an absence of new discoveries and theoretical progress and say that researchers are increasingly being attracted to 'more promising' fields, such as nanoscience." For instance, to date no theory of high Ts superconductivity adequately explains the behavior of such sytems, unlike for low Ts superconductivity where the phenomena is more than adequately explained by BCS theory.

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