What Makes New Superconductors Useful?

Discoveries of new superconductors and advances in R&D of high-Tc cuprates and Fe-based pnictides have shown that such captivating characteristics as high critical temperature and upper critical magnetic field are insufficient to assure applications at high magnetic fields and temperatures. Plenary speaker Alex Gurevich discusses the properties of materials that would be highly desirable in new practical superconductors and how the performance of existing superconductors can be enhanced by tuning the materials' properties and by nano-structuring.  

Making superconductors useful involves complex and expensive technologies addressing many conflicting physics and materials requirements, which are not only specific to a particular application but can also change depending on the operating field and temperature.

As representative examples, Gurevich considers the physics and materials science behind the optimization of superconductors used in high DC field magnets and high-Q resonators for particle accelerators or quantum circuits. These applications have different merit parameters and require very different ways of enhancing the material performance. Eventually, the most practical superconductors may not have the best superconducting properties but provide the best compromise between physics, materials science, technology, environmental impact, and cost.

Professor Gurevich is a theoretical condensed matter physicist specializing in superconductivity and materials science of high-performance superconductors carrying high current densities at high DC magnetic fields or operating under large-amplitude radio-frequency electromagnetic fields. His recent works have addressed anomalously large upper critical fields in alloyed MgB2, microwave reduction of nonlinear surface resistance, and new ways of boosting the microwave performance of superconducting resonators by surface nanostructuring. In 1989, he was awarded the Humboldt Fellowship to work on the high-Tc cuprates at the Institute of Technical Physics at KFK, Karlsruhe.

From 1992 to 2006, Professor Gurevich was a senior scientist in the Applied Superconductivity Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked on current-limiting mechanisms in superconducting materials. In 2006, he was a staff scientist at NHMFL, where he worked on properties of the newly discovered iron-based superconductors at high magnetic fields. In 2012, he joined the faculty of the Physics Department at Old Dominion University as a full professor. Gurevich is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has published two books and more than 190 journal papers and has given 110 invited talks.