FEYNMAN'S ONLY PAPER ON SUPERCONDUCTIVITY

FEYNMAN, R. P. [INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON THEORETICAL PHYSICS].

Superfluidity and Superconductivity.

Lancaster, American Physical Society, 1957. Lex8vo. In the original printed orange wrappers. In "Reviews of Modern Physics", Volume 29, April, No. 2, 1957. Entire issue offered. Lacking backtrip and stamp to front wrapper (Langley Aeronautical Laboratory). Otherwise a fine a copy. [Feynman] Pp. 205-212. [Entire issue: Pp. 159-254].

First printing of the Reviews of Modern Physics issue entirely dedicated to the International Congress on Theoretical Physics held in Seattle, Washington, 1957. The congress turned out to be exceptionally important in the field of superconductivity and Feynman here presented his only paper on the subject even though he spend most of the 1950ies on precisely this.

Feynman's work on the subject led directly to Bardeen's focus on the subject which eventually resulted on Bardenn, Leon Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer published their famous BCS-theory paper in 1957:

"John Bardeen, already well-known for his work leading to the discovery of the transistor, turned his full attention to superconductivity in 1951, having realized that the isotope effect identified the interaction between electrons that must be responsible for the phenomenon. The basic idea would be a Fermi-degenerate gas of nearly free electrons, with a weakly attractive interaction by way of the lattice phonons. Solving that problem - for example, finding the ground state of such a system - proved to be a difficult task. There was also the threat of powerful competition. Richard Feynman, one of the masters of quantum electrodynamics, could not help but notice the similarity between that problem and this one.
By 1955, by then at the University of Illinois at Urbana, Bardeen decided that reinforcements were needed. He called up C. N. Yang at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, to ask for a postdoc versed in the kind of field theory one uses in quantum electrodynamics. Yang recommended Leon Cooper. At about the same time, one of Bardeen's graduate students, J. Robert Schrieffer, decided to work on superconductivity. The team was assembled. In the cramped quarters of the University of Illinois physics department, Bardeen and Cooper had to share an office, a hardship that did not prove to be an obstacle to progress.
The team worked furiously in early 1957, driven in part by the feeling that Feynman was hot on the trail, using powerful new techniques they knew little about. However, it was not Feynman, but Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer who produced the microscopic theory" (Goodstein, Richard Feynman and the History of Superconductivity).

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