ENDING THE RACE FOR SUPERCONDUCTOR PRIZE

Author: By Alison Bass, Globe Staff

Date: Thursday, October 15, 1987
Page: 21
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

That uncertainty resulted in some unusually intense displays of raw ego in the past eight months as researchers jockeyed for the coveted prize.

One scientist speculated yesterday that the Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the physics prize to Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Mueller this year -- only 18 months after their initial discovery -- to end the politicking.

"Bednorz and Mueller are the ones who truly deserve this prize, but I'm surprised at the speed with which it was awarded," said a materials researcher who asked not to be identified. "Maybe this was a way to avoid further publicity-seeking and hype on the part of some."

Bednorz, of West Germany, and Mueller, of Switzerland, were the first to discover a ceramic oxide substance that loses all resistance to electricity when cooled to minus 397 Fahrenheit (35 degrees on the Kelvin scale, which starts at absolute zero).

Until this discovery, progress in the field of superconductivity had been frustratingly slow, and many scientists thought the science had reached its limit with substances that had to be cooled to near-absolute zero (minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit) before they became superconducting.

While the temperatures achieved by Bednorz and Mueller are still too cold for most practical application, their finding ignited a search for breakthroughs at even higher temperatures.

Ironically, Bednorz and Mueller, who worked at the IBM research laboratory in Zurich, were not among those who seemed to be lobbying for a Nobel.

After their initial discovery in January 1986, they went out of their way not to publicize the news. They made no announcement and did not even tell other IBM laboratories. Instead, they submitted a modest scientific paper to an obscure German journal, Zeitschrift fur Physik.

Bednorz acknowledged later that they had published in a journal that would remain unread by most physicists in order to have a "few more years" to continue their work in peace.

That plan failed. Their cautiously worded finding, published last fall, was noted by two laboratories, one in Japan and one in the United States.

In December 1986, both teams announced experiments confirming that the material -- a curious mixture of the elements barium, lanthanum, copper and oxygen -- was a superconductor.

Scientists have since pushed superconductivity temperatures up to 100 degrees Kelvin in materials that stay stable for long periods of time.

If room-temperature superconductivity can be achieved and more flexible superconducting materials fashioned, scientists envision an astonishing range of applications.

Because of the enormous potential of these materials, the push to find new and more efficient superconducting compounds has become an international race, with researchers feverishly working around the clock in their laboratories. In recent months, however, the effort has stalled somewhat, according to materials scientists.

Meanwhile, researchers are focusing their effort on understanding why these ceramic compounds become superconducting at certain temperatures.

When a material is not superconducting, the electrons carrying a current move in every possible direction, colliding randomly with each other and sapping energy. But in the new superconducting compounds, the electrons seem to move together in collision-free planes without dissipating energy.

Superconducting compounds need to be cooled to extreme temperatures because all atoms begin moving at temperatures above absolute zero, and the vibrations of those eventually become strong enough to knock some of the electrons out of their smooth planes of passage through the lattice-like structure of a superconducting substance.

BASS ;10/14 LDRISC;10/15,15:13 PHYSIC15