Cooper pair
Par de Cooper
- Date
- 1956 · confidence high
- Place
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, United States
- Credited to
- Leon Cooper
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Cooper showed that an arbitrarily weak attraction between two electrons in a metal is enough for them to form a bound pair with lower energy than the Fermi level, the missing piece Bardeen and Schrieffer needed to complete, a year later, the BCS theory of superconductivity.
What it led to
- BCS theory of superconductivity (1957) and its 1972 Nobel Prize
- Modern understanding of conventional superconductivity