Two Years of Magnesium Diboride

摘要

It is a little over two years since the announcement that magnesium diboride (MgB2) becomes a superconductor at a high transition temperature of 40 K. Hot paper #1 reached the pinnacle within four months of publication, and has now earned more than 640 citations, boosted by an impressive 103 hits in the current period. Clearly this is a paper that has transformed research into superconductors, and Thomson ISI's citation analysis gave an early warning that this paper was going to be a "big one." MgB_2 has turned out to be far more interesting, and surprising, than Jun Akimitsu can possibly have imagined when he reported the discovery in January 2001.