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Tue, October 9, 2012
Confirmed experimentally in 1963, Brian Josephson's predictions that both direct and alternating supercurrents flow through a tunnel barrier between two superconducting films were a key breakthrough in the development of superconductivity applications. Electron tunneling in such junctions had been reported in 1960 by Giaever and the group at A. D. Little. Using copies of entries in my Bell Labs notebooks, I will show how, in a collaboration with P. W. Anderson, the direct supercurrent and its dependence on small magnetic fields was observed in January 1963. The alternating supercurrent was observed by S. Shapiro a few months later. Early in 1964, following experiments by R. D. Parks and J. M. Mochel, Anderson extended the Josephson Effects from tunnel junctions to weak superconducting links.
Brian Josephson's predictions that both direct and alternating supercurrents flow through a tunnel barrier between two superconducting films were key in the development of superconductivity applications.
