50 Years of Fluxoid Quantization: 2e or Not 2e

The year 2011 is quite remarkable because it allows us to celebrate not only the centennial of the discovery of superconductivity by Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes (The superconductivity of Mercury, Comm. Phys. Lab. Univ. Leiden, vols. 122, 124, 1911), but also the half-centennial of the discovery of what is referred to as fluxoid quantization in superconductors by Robert Doll and Martin Näbauer (Phys. Rev. Lett. 7:51, 1961; Z. Phys. 169:526, 1962), and, independently, by Bascom S. Deaver Jr. and William Fairbank (Phys. Rev. Lett. 7:43, 1961; Ph.D. Thesis, Stanford University, 1962). The experimental proof of the quantization of magnetic flux (or more accurately fluxoid) in hollow superconducting cylinders actually supports two important theoretical concepts. The form of the fluxoid quantum, on the one hand, which contains twice the elementary charge, allows for the conclusion, that the superconducting ground state can be viewed as a condensate of electron pairs, as predicted by the BCS theory of superconductivity (Bardeen et al. in Phys. Rev. 106:162, 1957; Phys. Rev. 108:1175, 1957). It can be viewed, on the other hand, as a quantum phenomenon seen on macroscopic scales and thus supports the concept of the bosonic macroscopic wave function, here applied to the description of (quasi-bosonic) fermion pair condensates. This review is devoted to a discussion of the physics behind the Doll-Näbauer, Deaver-Fairbank discoveries and is intended to review historically the chain of events which motivated these talented experimentalists and which led to their independent discoveries at quite remote points of the earth.