The recent demonstration of superconductivity in uranium beryllide (UBe13) by an ETH–Los Alamos collaboration provides us the second example of an exotic and potentially instructive new class of materials, the “heavy‐fermion superconductors.” Four years ago, Frank Steglich and his colleagues at Darmstadt and Cologne reported the discovery of the first of these unconventional and somewhat puzzling new superconductors—CeCu2Si2. The unearthing of UBe13 is important not only because it shows that CeCu2Si2 is not a unique abberation. Until recently, investigations of CeCu2Si2 have been plagued by the difficulty of fabricating stoichiometrically clean, reproducible samples of this material; different samples were giving distressingly different results. With the advent of UBe13, where one does not have this metallurgical problem, and with new techniques for making crystalline CeCu2Si2 samples of high quality, one now has two sources of reliable data on the heavy‐fermion superconductors.

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