The KRYO 2008 Workshop held in Königslutter am Elm, Germany

October 12, 2008 (HE25). The annual Workshop “Cryoelectronic Components” (KRYO 2008) was held from October 6th to October 8th, 2008, at the beautiful location of Königslutter am Elm near Braunschweig, Germany. At this workshop, the German community active in superconducting electronics and related cryogenics annually presents progress in current work and also exchanges insights gained at international meetings, such as the preceding ASC, for example. In order to make the KRYO 2008 particularly interesting and useful for diploma, PhD students and younger scientists, it again started with a tutorial session. Expert colleagues of PTB-Braunschweig presented and discussed the metrological triangle.  The topics were: single charge devices and metrology (Alexander Zorin), applications of the Josephson effect in electrical metrology (Ralf Behr), and resistance metrology and the Quantum Hall effect (Franz Joseph Ahlers).

This year’s Workshop was very well organized by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Braunschweig, the German equivalent of NIST in the US. The Chairman was Dr. Johannes Kohlmann of PTB. The workshop program consisted of contributions ranging from fundamental aspects of Josephson junctions to applications of Josephson junctions in detectors (e.g. for the THz range) and SQUIDs, in integrated circuits for voltage standards and in superconducting digital electronics. Superconducting qubits and quantum circuits were represented only by few contributions, because of a qubit workshop simultaneously held in Italy. Within the program, several very interesting invited talks and contributions covered novel topics not yet published.  The final program of the workshop and the abstracts are accessible here. Most of the oral presentations and posters were in English; slides of talks given in German were also in English.  About 70 participants attended the workshop. While this annual workshop is a national event, international participants, especially from neighbouring countries, occasionally participate and are always welcome.  A few such participants were present also this time.

The organizers chose to hold the meeting in a small historical town of Königslutter am Elm, not far from Braunschweig. All functions of the event were held at the Avalon hotel conference centre. This modern facility offered a pleasant, comfortable environment, an excellent meeting facility, as well as room and board for the participants. The next workshop, KRYO 2009, will be organized by the Technical University Ilmenau, this time in the Panorama Hotel Oberhof in Oberhof, a resort locality in the Forest of Thuringia (Thüringer Wald), Germany.