In order to understand the emergence of superconductivity it is useful to study the reverse process and identify the various pathways that lead to its destruction. One way is to increase the amount of disorder, as this leads to an increase in Coulomb repulsion that overpowers the attractive interaction responsible for Cooper pair formation. A second pathway—applicable to uniformly disordered materials—is to utilize the competition between superconductivity and Anderson localization, as this leads to electronic granularity in which phase and amplitude fluctuations of the superconducting order parameter play a role. Finally, a third pathway is to construct an array of superconducting islands coupled by some form of proximity effect that leads from a superconducting state to a state with finite resistivity, which appears like a metallic groundstate. This Review Article summarizes recent progress in understanding of these different pathways, including experiments in low dimensional materials and application in superconducting quantum devices.

为了理解超导电性的出现，研究逆过程并找出导致其破坏的各种途径是有用的。一种方法是增加无序量，因为这会导致库仑排斥力的增加，从而使负责库珀对形成的有吸引力的相互作用不堪重负。第二条途径（适用于均匀无序的材料）是利用超导性与安德森局部化之间的竞争，因为这会导致电子粒度，其中超导阶数参数的相位和幅度波动会发挥作用。最后，第三个途径是构建由某种形式的邻近效应耦合的超导岛阵列，这种接近效应会导致从超导状态到具有有限电阻率的状态，该状态看起来像金属基态。