Magnetic behaviour of supraconducting tin spheres

Abstract

Until a year ago it was generally accepted that if a body is made supraconducting while in a magnetic field the lines of magnetic force were "frozen in," i. e ., whatever lines of force passed through the body at the time when it became supraconducting remained there afterwards, unaffected by any change in the external field, so long as the body was supraconducting. Meissner and Ochsenfeld, however, showed that this supposition was not true. They measured field strengths in the immediate neighbourhood of cylinders which had been cooled to supraconductivity in an external magnetic field, and found that the field of force was then of the same nature as that to be expected in the neighbourhood of perfectly diamagnetic bodies. Thus it appeared that when a body becomes supraconducting in a magnetic field the lines of force are all pressed out of the body, and the induction inside the body falls to zero. At the same time, however, these authors report on another experiment, the result of which appears to us not entirely in accordance with the assumption that the induction in the whole body became zero. They measured the field strengths inside and outside a hollow cylinder, after it had become supraconducting in a field perpendicular to its axis, and found again that the field strength outside was as if the cylinder were almost perfectly diamagnetic, but the field inside was appreciably the same as if the cylinder were non-supraconducting. We therefore made a number of experiments, hoping to find out more exactly the nature of the phenomenon.