Meissner effect

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A magnet levitating above a superconductor cooled by liquid nitrogen.

The Meissner effect is an expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor during its transition to the superconducting state. The German physicists Walther Meissner and Robert Ochsenfeld discovered the phenomenon in 1933 by measuring the magnetic field distribution outside superconducting tin and lead samples. The samples, in the presence of an applied magnetic field, were cooled below their superconducting transition temperature. Below the transition temperature the samples cancelled nearly all interior magnetic fields. They detected this effect only indirectly; because the magnetic flux is conserved by a superconductor, when the interior field decreased, the exterior field increased. The experiment demonstrated for the first time that superconductors were more than just perfect conductors and provided a uniquely defining property of the superconducting state.