A century after Onne's discovery

This year witnesses the centenary of superconductivity, which has spawned incredibly rich physics not limited to cryogenic field. Look at this review [http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v7/n4/full/nphys1981.html?WT.ec_id=NPHYS-201104]:

But continuing work on fundamental superconductivity is not the only legacy of the original discovery. Nor is the research concentrated on the high-temperature superconductors. On the contrary, organic superconductors, heavy fermions and ruthenates all continue to hold secrets. Over the past century, many ideas spawned by superconductivity have influenced or directly led to whole new fields of research. These include the study of helium-3, both for its cryogenic applications and multiple superfluid phases — Landau's Fermi liquid theory was originally proposed to explain the properties of helium-3. The study of non-Fermi liquids, with several examples of quantum criticality, is another active field.

In fact, these are all examples of strongly correlated electron systems, in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Or, to quote Philip Anderson: “more is different”. Such materials exhibit all kinds of unexpected behaviour such as geometric frustration, glassy dynamics and metal–insulator transitions, to name but a few. Work in low-dimensional systems, including the study and manipulation of heterointerfaces within a superlattice structure, is also ongoing; and superconductivity even has an important role to play in the search for Majorana fermions in topological insulators.