Electric current certain materials when cooled below a characteristic critical temperature. It was discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes on April 8, 1911 in Leiden. Like ferromagnetism and atomic spectral lines, superconductivity is a quantum mechanical phenomenon. It is characterized by the Meissner effect, the complete ejection of magnetic field lines from the interior of the superconductor as it transitions into the superconducting state. The occurrence of the Meissner effect indicates that superconductivity cannot be understood simply as the idealization of "perfect conductivity" in classical physics. In a semiconductor it is sometimes useful to think of the current as due to the flow
Leiden scale Leiden scale The Leiden scale (°L) was used to calibrate low-temperature indirect measurements in the early twentieth century, by providing conventional values (in kelvins, then termed "degrees Kelvin") of helium vapour pressure. It was used below -183°C, the starting point of the International Temperature scale in the 1930s (Awbery 1934). The Leiden scale probably goes back to around 1894, when Heike Kamerlingh Onnes' cryogenic laboratory was established in Leiden, Netherlands. It has been reported that the scale is the kelvin scale shifted so that the boiling points of hydrogen and oxygen become zero and 70 respectively, but this is unlikely