In 1998, he moved to detector magnets, working on the superconducting toroid of the ATLAS experiments. He designed various measuring and testing systems for critical current and joint resistance of the aluminium super-stabilized conductor (rated for 60 kA at 5 T) and  followed the industrial production of the conductor, in collaboration with CEA-Saclay.

 

In 2001, he became responsible for the LASA superconducting magnet group, taking over the responsibility for the construction of the 25 m long superconducting coils for the ATLAS Barrel Toroid. He worked in close collaboration with CEA-Saclay and ATLAS magnet team. He also took care of the thermal shield of the barrel toroid magnet as well as of some critical components for the magnet protection, like the dump system. The success of the ATLAS magnets is due also to his much-appreciated competence and hard work.

 

At the end of LHC construction in 2008, with the colleagues of INFN-Genoa and in collaboration with the GSI team, he contributed to the design, construction and test of the first prototype of the SIS-300 pulsed dipole for the FAIR project, which was successfully tested in 2013.

 

From 2013-2016 he was a member of the EuCARD2 collaboration, for which he started to design and build a variable temperature test facility for the magnet prototype.

 

In 2014, he joined CERN as Associate to the High Luminosity LHC Project, on leave from INFN, while maintaining the position of group leader at LASA laboratory.  He designed and successful tested the first of the super-ferric magnets, a new design that will be used in HiLumi LHC for all high-order corrector magnets. This success gained him the confidence of CERN and resulted in assigning to INFN-LASA the construction of all types of super-ferric magnets for the HiLumi LHC project. He could only draw the first plan to accomplish that project; sudden illness took him away for his loved ones, his friends and colleagues.

 

Lucio Rossi

Prof. Lucio Rossi
High Luminosity LHC Project Leader
CERN – Accelerator & Technology Sector

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Remembering Edgar A. Edelsack,
1924-2017

May 5, 2017 (PO58).  Edgar A. (Ed) Edelsack was a physicist in the fields of nuclear physics, solid state physics and applied superconductivity who, in the second half of the 20^th century, distinguished himself as one of leading supporters of superconductivity in the United States. He died April 4, 2017, of pneumonia at the age of almost 93.

 

Ed was born on June 14, 1924, in New York City, where he also attended high school and the New York University (NYU, 1941 - 1943). He was inducted into the US Army in 1943. While in military service, he was trained in mechanical engineering at Washington State College (now the Washington State University). He then served in the European war theater--Ardennes, the Rhineland and Central Europe—as a gun crewman in the 11^th Army Division, 491^st Armored Battalion. An event that deeply marked him was his service in the newly liberated Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp, where for some days he assisted the starved and emaciated former inmates¹.

 

After the war, Ed returned to the study of physics at the University of Southern California (USC) and graduated there with a BS in 1948. He continued with graduate study at USC until 1950 and completed the class work for a Ph.D. In 1950, he also spent some time at the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies. 

 

From 1949 until 1953 Ed was employed at the Emery Tumor Institute in Los Angeles, CA where he constructed a 2 MeV electron accelerator used for the treatment of cancer patients, and supervised a radioactive isotope laboratory capable of handling intense radioactive sources. Subsequently, 1953-1957, he worked at the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in San Francisco, CA. There, he managed the 2 MeV proton/electron accelerator and supervised physicists and engineers engaged in fundamental and applied nuclear physics and radiation biophysics research. Between 1957 and 1967, Ed worked for the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in San Francisco, where he was responsible for technical reviews and evaluation of over thirty Navy-supported physics and biophysics projects at academic and industrial laboratories.

 

Finally, in 1967, Ed moved to Arlington, VA, to join the Physical Sciences Division of ONR. Once there, he soon started the ONR superconductive electronics program of which, in the role of a Senior Program Manager, he remained in charge until his retirement in 1986. During that time he served as a catalyst in starting the International Cryocooler Conference and actively supported newly established conference forums, such as the Applied Superconductivity Conference (ASC). In 1986, as that Conference Chair, he organized the ASC in Baltimore, MD, celebrating the 75^th anniversary of the discovery of superconductivity.

 

While very active in the area of applied superconductivity, Ed considered it essential to also provide support to basic science. Although one may think that ONR should focus only on specific applications directly related to Navy’s needs, Ed understood that ONR, the oldest scientific agency in the United States, should have a vital interest in supporting the development of basic science. Ed interpreted his area of responsibility broadly, even though this was not always an easy task².

One of Ed’s proudest achievements at ONR was his support and initiative for research in SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) magnetometry, which created a bridge between superconductivity and biophysics. In 1969 at Ed’s suggestion, and with ONR support, a magnetically shielded room was constructed at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). In it, the research team of David Cohen and James E. (Jim) Zimmerman recorded the very first magnetocardiograms³ of the heart thanks to the use of a SQUID magnetometer newly developed by Jim. This led directly to the establishment of biomagnetism as a research area and clinical discipline. Ed authored and co-authored more than 50 papers, as well as co-edited a two-volume book edition on superconductivity (The Science and Technology of Superconductivity, Plenum Press, 1973).

 

Once retired, Ed served as adjunct professor in the School of Engineering at George Washington University (GWU) and as a consultant with the Institute of Defense Analysis and HYPRES, Inc., where he served later as Chairman of that company’s Scientific Advisory Board. He volunteered his time at GWU to enhance programs for science teachers in public schools, as well as directly in local schools themselves.

 

In 2002, Ed became the very first awardee of the newly established IEEE Max Swerdlow Award for Sustained Service to the Applied Superconductivity Community, one of the prestigious awards sponsored by the IEEE Council on Superconductivity.

 

Ed is survived by his wife of 35 years, Charlotte Nusberg, son and daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren.  As a WWII veteran, Ed will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery. 

 

We thank the widow, Mrs. Charlotte Nusberg, for providing and verifying many biographic details. Her help was invaluable.

 

Alex Braginski, Juelich Research Center
Vladimir Kresin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Marty Nisenoff, formerly Naval Research Laboratory (retired)
Bruce Strauss, President, IEEE Council on Superconductivity

 

Alexei Abrikosov 1928-2017

 

In 1951–1952 he worked with N.V. Zavaritskii, an experimentalist of the same institute, to experimentally verify the critical magnetic field of thin films predicted by the recently published Ginzburg-Landau phenomenological theory of superconductivity.  This work and its subsequent extension to bulk materials resulted in the Formulation of the concept of Type II superconductivity, the lower and upper critical fields, prediction of vortices and the vortex lattice.  This work, one of the most cited in the world scientific literature, proved invaluable for the development of practical conductor technology.

 

In the mid-1950's, Abrikosov worked also on several other topics, including the quantum electrodynamics at high energies, the subject of his Doctor of Science dissertation (a degree analogous to the Central-European habilitation), which he defended in 1955.  Towards the end of that decade he then collaborated with Lev Gor’kov on theory of superconducting alloys and superconductors with magnetic impurities, in which they predicted the possibility of gapless superconductivity.  In collaboration with I. Khalatnikov they also studied the behavior of superconductors in high-frequency magnetic fields. Later, Abrikosov collaborated also with M. P. Kemoklidze on a related problem.

 

From the 1960's on, Abrikosov’s interests turned towards normal metals, semi-metals and semiconductors.  We refrain from listing Abrikosov’s theoretical achievements in these and other areas not related directly to superconductivity, but should mention that in 1961 he published with Lev Gor’kov and Igor Dzyaloshinskii the “Quantum Field Theoretical Methods in Statistical Physics”, the seminal textbook on the subject (see photo).  After the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity, Abrikosov, got interested in high-T_c layered cuprates, jumped once more into the fray and developed his own version of cuprate superconductivity theory, which could explain a good part of their unusual behavior, including the isotope effect, neutron scattering, pseudogap and the metal-insulator transiton.

 

In 1965, Abrikosov was one of organizers of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (now the Landau Institute), where became Head of the Condensed Matter Theory Department, in parallel with various teaching appointments (see below). In 1988, Abrikosov was elected Director of the Institute of High-pressure Physics of the Academy in Troitsk, near Moscow.  In 1991, with the demise of Soviet Union, he moved to the United States where he accepted an invitation of the Argonne National Laboratory to become Distinguished Argonne Scientist and then head of the condensed matter theory group in the Materials Science Division, 1992 - 2000.  He continued to collaborate with that Division until his terminal illness.

 

Abrikosov’s teaching career started at the Moscow State University, where he climbed from Assistant to Associated and Full Professor, 1960-1969.  In 1970-1972 he was Professor at the State University of Gorky (now Nizhnyi Nowgorod), from 1976 to 1991 Chair of Theoretical Physics at the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys.  At the US, he was Adjunct Professor, University of Illinois, Chicago, and University of Utah.  He held also the Leverhulm adjunct professorship at the University of Loughborough, UK.

 

Prior to the Nobel Prize in 2003 (together with Vitaly Ginzburg and Anthony Legett) “for pioneering work on the theory of superconductivity and superfluidity”, Abrikosov received numerous other distinctions and prizes, in Soviet Union, the US and elsewhere.  Already in 1964, he was elected corresponding member of the Soviet Academy.  In 1966, he received the Lenin Prize, together with Lev Landau, Vitaly Ginzburg and Lev Gor’kov, for the theory of superconductivity in strong magnetic fields.  In 1972, Abrikosov was awarded the Fritz London Prize in Low-temperature Physics, in 1982 the USSR State Prize, in 1987 he became full member of the Academy, in 1991 received the John Bardeen Award, again together with Ginzburg and Gor’kov.  In 1992 Abrikosov became Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), in 2000 member of the US National Academy of Sciences.   He was a foreign member of the Royal Society (UK), received honorary doctorates from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland, 1975) and Bordeaux (France, 2003).

 

Abrikosov has been remembered by his colleagues and collaborators as remarkably gifted writer, erudite and congenial story teller.  He had a strong personality and was very principled.  His deep sense of humor helped him to overcome many adversities he faced in his long and very eventful life.  In his free time, he loved to climb mountains.

 

 

This obituary is compiled basing primarily on the autobiography Abrikosov wrote at the occasion of his Nobel Prize (in “The Nobel Prizes 2003”, Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 2004), the article in his memory published by A. F. Andreev et al. in Uspekhy Fiz. Nauk (UFN) 187, No. 4, 463-464 (2017), and also on the obituary posted by Argonne National Laboratory at its website.  We especially thank A. A. Varlamov of SPIN-CNR and Rome University, Italy, one of co-authors of the UFN memorial article, for his critical review of this SNF obituary.  Another UFN memorial co-author, V. Mineev of CEA, France, provided that article.  We also thank Vladimir Kresin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Bruce Strauss, Dept. of Energy, both USA, for their kind assistance.  Prior to publishing this obituary, we temporarily posted (with permission) the obituary published by APS News.

 

¹His father was the chief pathologist of Soviet Union.

 

 

During David’s technical leadership of OMT Ltd., the business received Queen’s Awards for Technology (UK) in 1985, 1991 and 1996, Export in 1985 and 1991 and Enterprise in 2001. David’s personal contributions to the superconducting industry were recognized by the conferring of the Max Swerdlow Award of the IEEE Council on Superconductivity at the 24^th International Conference on Magnet Technology (MT24) in Seoul, Korea in 2015. Having been Managing Director of Oxford Biosensors followed by UK and Ireland Managing Director of Quest Diagnostics, in recent times he was enjoying being back in the world of superconductivity in an advisory capacity with Tokomak Energy.

 

David was very much a people’s person whose passion, dedication and friendship will be a great loss to his colleagues and our community. David’s professional legacy should be thought of not just in business terms, but also in human terms.  He developed younger generations of business leaders, within and beyond superconductivity, by providing an inspirational role model of how to build and manage complex teams working on the most demanding problems in a very cost-competitive market. He leaves us with many memories of an utterly positive and ethical engineer and manager who had an unusual empathy for all who worked with him.  For this he will be missed but never forgotten, with so many happy memories and experiences shared. He is survived by his wife Judith, and children Matthew, Rebecca and Elizabeth. A Special Memorial session dedicated to David is to be held at MT-25 in Amsterdam.

 

Peter E. Gifford Remembered

Peter was born in Washington, DC, in 1949. He moved to many places with his parents before finally settling in Syracuse in 1961 when Peter was 12 years old. He was a tennis champion in high school and played on the city championship high school football team. He studied physics and math at Syracuse University before graduating with a Liberal Arts degree. In 1973 he began working with his father at CRYOMECH, which at that time had only two full-time employees.  Peter took over full leadership of the company and its handful of employees in 1980 after his father became ill with cancer and later passed away.  Peter and his employees, whom he treated as part of his family, were able to grow the company into one of the world’s best known cryocooler companies, which now employees about 130 people. The company designs and manufactures cryogenic refrigerators for use in cutting edge research and production from agriculture to aerospace.

 

Peter’s success in growing the company partly stems from his keen insight into the need for a niche market catering to the needs of researchers in a wide variety of cryogenic cooling applications. Whereas his competitors focused mostly on large mass production markets, Peter found an important need for the development of cryocoolers for many new applications. CRYOMECH has been especially successful after the development of the first commercial 4 K pulse tube cryocooler, which has become an important tool for researchers who previously used liquid helium in experiments, but are now switching to cryocoolers as the helium price has greatly increased and its availability has become erratic. Peter made CRYOMECH successful by doing things no other company could do.  His physics background helped him understand the scientific challenges his customers faced.  He enjoyed challenges and developing new things.

 

The company also became successful because of his contagious, outgoing personality. He always had a smile and a knack for making you feel appreciated. His laughing, joking and storytelling would put you at ease immediately.  One of the highlights of my trips to conferences was a chance to talk to Peter, usually at the CRYOMECH booth in the exhibit hall. His enthusiasm made me feel good and I could enjoy a few laughs with him.  He was very kind to his employees and treated them as part of his family, often hosting informal get-togethers for the whole company.

 

After being diagnosed with cancer, he began to plan for the long-term future of the company. Instead of selling out to some larger company or venture capital firm, whom he feared might strip the company and move it away from Syracuse, he decided to offer it to his employees through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP).  He wanted it to remain in Syracuse because of his employees and because of the supportive nature of the business community in upstate New York. The company went ESOP in 2014. In an interview with the Syracuse newspaper in 2015, he explained that his approach to dealing with employees and customers followed the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

 

When not at CRYOMECH or interacting with attendees at conference exhibits, he most often could be found alongside some stream somewhere in the world enjoying his favorite pastime of fly fishing. He built a house in the Catskills on the bank of the West Branch of the Delaware River in Hancock, NY, where he could fish, relax, and enjoy the environment in the presence of his family and many friends. He is survived by his wife and partner of 37 years, Lorraine Koury; sisters Jenni Shone (Robert) of Strafford, NH; Hilary Gifford (Ben Guthrie) of Trumansburg, NY; and brother Robert Mac Gifford of Syracuse, NY.

 

Peter, rest in peace and catch lots of fish.

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In the early 80's, as a PhD student, I learned about “Gifford” as the guy who had invented the GM-cooler together with MacMahon. I used these GM coolers in my PhD research, and I recall that later in my career I had the opportunity to meet Gifford’s son Peter at one of my first EUCAS conferences at a booth of CRYOMECH. What an impressive personality and what a pleasure to sit and talk with him, totally different from what at that time I had in mind as typical company leaders. Following that first meeting, I took the opportunity at all cryogenic conferences to go and look for Peter, for a quick chat or a longer discussion on what we would need for our specific applications. I do recall the visit to CRYOMECH at the 2014 International Cryocooler Conference and the last words I then had with Peter. I did not know at that time that he was already seriously ill.

The cryo-world lost a great personality, a great innovator, and stimulator.

We express our deepest sympathy to family and friends and to the CRYOMECH team for the loss of Peter.

On behalf of the International Cryogenic Engineering Committee and the Cryogenic Society of Europe, 
Marcel ter Brake.

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Obituary written by Ray Radebaugh with a personal note by Marcel ter Brake.

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Carl L. Goodzeit 1928 – 2017

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His first position was as senior research engineer at General Motors in Detroit.  He joined Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York as a Senior Engineer in the Physics Department (1959-1982) and then Magnet Division (1982-1989). From 1990-1994, he was a Senior Engineer and Group Leader for the Magnet Division of the Superconducting Super Collider Lab in Texas. Most recently he has worked as an engineering consultant in Texas. He holds several patents, and in November 2016, he delivered a paper on a dual armature design for advanced electric motor technology at the Electric and Hybrid Aerospace Technology Symposium in Cologne, Germany.

 

Carl loved tennis, cooking, sailing, cats, the Bahamas, and spending time with his family. He is survived by his wife of nearly 55 years, Connie Goodzeit, and his four children, Neil, Alison, James, and Carolyn, his five grandchildren, Elliot, Emma, Olivia, Michael and Victoria. Carl was one of a kind, and his family adored him for his humor, intelligence and his unique personality.

 

At Brookhaven, Carl worked on the design, construction, and operation of Bubble Chambers when these devices were a principal tool for detecting elementary particles in the physics research being done at the Brookhaven accelerators. This work was mechanically challenging because these detectors used liquid hydrogen, magnetic fields, and forceful pressure pulses to reveal tracks in the chamber. Liquid hydrogen is a very volatile and flammable substance so safety was a foremost consideration. In 1982, be began work on superconducting magnets and made numerous valuable contributions to the development of these difficult magnets for the CBA, SSC, and RHIC Colliders. His focus was always on ways to contain the large forces in these magnets, forces that act to break the magnet apart. To that end, he perfected a collar design for the SSC that would have been used for industrial production of those magnets had the project continued. The unique design of the RHIC magnet collaring system, using the magnet’s steel yoke as a collar while still respecting its needed magnetic properties, was largely his invention and has served well in that machine for the many years is has been in operation. To achieve the necessary understanding of the mechanics at work, and to guide the collar development, he developed a strain gauge measuring system that allowed unambiguous analysis of the forces at work in the magnet.

 

Carl joined the SSC laboratory in 1990 and became the reference engineer for all the newly hired and not very experienced people in the magnet development group. He organized a Technology Transfer Program for the companies selected for dipole industrialization.  He was fundamental in transferring to them the accumulated knowledge, but also in warning them about possible design misinterpretations and possible problems in going too far in industrial assembly lines without considering the intrinsic specificity of superconductor magnets. He participated in the task force in charge of the revision of the SSC dipole design when its aperture was increased from 40 to 50 mm. His remarks and suggestions were extremely pertinent, permitting a rapid convergence for the launch of the prototyping program based on FNAL and BNL proposals. In the meantime, he collaborated on the design of a fifteen-meter long superconducting quadruple for the interaction regions, the first magnet to be ever designed and built wholly by the SSC laboratory. His contribution was paramount in defining a novel and innovative mechanical structure fulfilling robustness, manufacturing simplicity and costs. Two two-meter-long models were built and demonstrated the soundness of the design, reaching short sample limits in very few quenches, well above operating current and with no retraining. After more than two decades of oblivion, this structure is again strongly being reconsidered for new generation quadrupoles.

 

After the SSC project was cancelled, Carl continued technical work as a consultant. From 1994 through 1998 he was a co-developer of a CD-ROM tutorial ‘Superconducting Accelerator Magnets’ that was funded by a US Dept of Energy SBIR award to MJB Consulting (later MJB Plus) in DeSoto, TX. When that project was completed, he was a consultant on several magnet development projects for the Advanced Magnet Lab, Florida. In January 2001, he presented “An Introduction to Mechanical Design and Construction Methods, a segment of the Superconducting Accelerator Magnets course at the US Particle Accelerator School at Rice University.  He then spent several years developing his concept for a dual armature topology to almost double the specific power of a radial field electrical machine. From 2010-2013 he collaborated with Florida Institute of Technology on an NSF funded project for the design, construction and testing of a dual armature prototype generator. His final interests were related to application of the dual armature electric machine topology for aircraft propulsion.

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Mauricio Lopes Remembered

February 8, 2017 (PO53). Mauricio (Mau) de Lima Lopes, a scientist in the Fermilab Technical Division, passed away on January 3, 2017. He was 41 years old.

 

Mau was born in São Bernardo do Campo, a city in the Brazilian State of São Paolo, on July 20, 1975. He received his BS, MSc and Ph.D. in physics from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His Masters degree and Ph.D. theses were on the design of the Brazilian Microtron located in São Paulo.

Part of his Ph.D. research was performed at the Mainzer Microtron (MAMI) of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, when he received a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauch Dienst, DAAD) to study at this institution. While at MAMI he participated in the design of extraction magnets for the Harmonic Double Sided Microtron upgrade. According to Mau, it was during that period that he learned about 3D magnetic simulations.

 

In January 2005, while completing his Ph.D. research, Mau was hired to work on the ALBA Light Source in Barcelona as a magnet designer. Mau was responsible for the design of room temperature magnets for the storage ring, booster ring and transfer lines. Mau completed his Ph.D. in December 2005 and continued to work at ALBA through early 2007.

 

In 2007 Mau came to Fermilab, starting as a postdoc, then later promoted to staff scientist, in the Fermilab Technical Division Magnet Systems Department. Mau spent the next ten years expanding his considerable talents as a magnet designer to superconducting magnet technology. Mau worked on magnet designs for several projects important to the Fermilab and the greater High Energy Physics (HEP) community, such magnets for International Linear Collider interaction region and Muon collider cooling channels. His body of work is documented in numerous publications and conference proceedings.

 

Arguably, his most important contributions were made to the Fermilab muon to electron (Mu2e) experiment. Starting in 2010, Mau took on the important task of the magnetic design of the Mu2e Transport Solenoid (TS) magnets. As the name implies these solenoid magnets are responsible for the transport of muons from the production target to the stopping target. TS has a unique “S” shape geometry. The magnetic design had to strictly adhere to field requirements in curved and adjoining straight sections. The design had to meet these field requirements under all construction tolerance scenarios. To facilitate these studies, Mau developed his own suite of analysis programs called SolCalc.  With its user friendly interface and graphic interface, these programs allowed him to construct and analyze in a straightforward manner hundreds of magnetic models within the design systematic and random fabrication tolerances. This analysis in turn enabled him to identify for the project those tolerances that were key to the TS fabrication.

 

Mau continued to expand his contributions to the Mu2e project. Along with the TS design, Mau was given responsibility for overseeing the magnetic model for the entire Mu2e experiment.  Mau worked closely with the Mu2e collaboration, generating field maps for studying beam transport and background studies, as well as conducting beam transport studies on his own.

In 2013 he became the deputy project manager for the Mu2e TS and a year later became the TS manager.  As the TS leader he was responsible for both the technical design and cost and schedule for this part of the Mu2e project. As such he was the technical interface with between the Mu2e project and the vendor responsible for the fabrication of the TS coils and was pivotal in establishing our ongoing TS fabrication campaign.

In addition to his contribution to the field of magnet technology, Mau often talked about his passion for teaching. Mau taught and co-taught several classes at the United States Particle Accelerator School (USPAS) in the field of magnet technology. In 2014 he received recognition for exemplary performance as an USPAS instructor from both USPAS and Fermilab. Over the years he mentored and supervised many summer students from various Fermilab student programs.

Those who worked with Mau or who were mentored by Mau fondly remember his warm personality, his generosity towards others and his wonderful sense of humor. He will be deeply missed. 

Giorgio Ambrosio, Andy Hocker, Jeremiah Holzbauer, Michael Lamm, Vito Lombardo, Ron Ray and Bruce Strauss

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Eric Gregory Passed Away

 

In 2002 he was one of the first four recipients of the IEEE Award for Continuing and Significant Contributions to Applied Superconductor Materials Technology for his pioneering work in optimizing the critical current density in niobium-titanium alloys and leadership in the commercialization, by a number of companies, of multi-filamentary conductors for high energy physics particle accelerator projects.

 

He was a partner in Supergenics LLC before retirement and the recipient of a number of Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the US Department of Energy. For 13 years he was Manager of R & D for Intermagnetics General Corporation (IGC) Advanced Superconductors Division (now Mitsubishi and formerly Luvata) and spent most of this time directing work on the development, manufacturing and testing of internal-tin Nb₃Sn. Much of this work was DOE sponsored. His small group has also supplied the majority of the conductor made in North America for the US section of the ITER Central Solenoid Model Coil, Nb₃Sn material for KSTAR and the coil to be levitated in the LDX project. Recently, in development work for DOE in the High Energy Physics (HEP) area, the group made strands with critical current in the superconductor fraction (J_cs) of 2550 A/mm² at 12T in the non-Cu.

 

Dr. Gregory had 39 years of experience in applied superconductivity research and, before joining IGC, was in charge of all superconducting operations at Supercon, Inc. as Executive Vice President. Under his direction the strand adopted by the SSC and subsequently the LHC was developed.

Prior to that he was General Manager of Oxford-Airco and established and operated the Carteret, NJ facility of what is now Oxford Superconducting Technology. During this period, the strands now used routinely in MRI and NMR were developed. Also the Westinghouse coil conductor (the first Nb₃Sn Cable in Conduit Conductor (CICC)) was developed.

From 1972 to 1979 he was Director of Corporate Research and Development for Airco at what is now BOC Group, plc. Technical Center in Murray Hill, NJ. From 1959 to 1972 he was Assistant Director and later the Director of the Physical Sciences Section of Airco’s Central Research Laboratory.

From 1956 to 1959 he worked in powder metallurgy of heat treatable cutting tools and burnable poisons for fission reactors at the Sintercast Corporation in Yonkers, NY.

From 1953 to 1956 he worked in the production and development of conventional powder metallurgy parts for the Manganese Bronze & Brass Co in Ipswich UK.

 

He was past president of Cambridge University Metallurgy Society, The Metal Science Club of New York, the New York Chapter of the American Society for Metals, and the New York Chapter of The American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers.

He leaves his beloved wife of 60 years, Blanche L. (Ring) Gregory of Holden, Massachusetts, and daughter, Pamela Gregory of Campbellsville, Kentucky.

Notes written by Bruce Zeitlin and Bruce Strauss.

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Lev P. Gor'kov, 1929 - 2016

January 20, 2017 (PO51). Lev Petrovich Gor'kov, professor of physics and world-renowned theorist in the field of condensed matter physics, and especially superconductivity, died on December 28, 2016. He was a student of the famous Nobel laureate Lev Landau, and belonged to the group of prominent Russian physicists known as the “Landau school”.

 

Gor’kov was born in Moscow, then the Soviet Union, on June 14, 1929.  In 1947 he started his studies in technical physics, initially at the Moscow State University (MGU) and obtained his diploma (M.Sc.) in 1953 at the Institute of Physical Problems (IFP). Subsequently, he started his doctoral studies while working in the theory department of IFP headed by Landau. In 1956 Gor’kov defended there his PhD¹ dissertation and stayed until 1963, when he transferred for a couple of years to Chernogolovka² as the head of the theory department in the Institute of Chemical Physics. In 1961 he earned the degree of D.Sc., the Soviet/Russian equivalent of European habilitation. In 1965, he moved to the new Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences³, of which he was one of organizers, and headed the Chair “Problems of Theoretical Physics”.  He was active there until 1991, the last three years as 

the Deputy Director, when he left Russia and moved to the United States. After a short stay as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he moved to the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL or “MagLab”) at Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, of which he was one of the founding scientists and the leading theorist (Program Director in Condensed Matter). He remained there until his demise.

 

Gor’kov’s interest in superconductivity was stimulated by the publication of the BCS theory in 1958. A few months later he developed and published the Gorkov’s equations, a strong theoretical tool, which became the base contemporary theory of superconductivity. He then proceeded in 1959 to develop microscopic foundations of the phenomenological Ginzburg-Landau theory, today known under the acronym GLAG (Ginzburg-Landau-Abrikosov-Gor’kov), which eventually became the most universal approach to study electromagnetic properties of superconductors. In 1958-1960, Gor’kov together with A. Abrikosov developed the theory of superconducting alloys and predicted the possibility of gapless superconductivity. In early 1970s, Gor’kov, together with G. Eliashberg, established the foundations of the theory of non-stationary and non-equilibrium effects in superconductors, describing their behavior in alternating fields, nonlinearity and the vortex dynamics. In late 1970s and 1980s he then consecutively worked on theories of A15 alloys, organic 1D superconductors and heavy fermions. We don’t mention here his more general and towering contributions to condensed matter physics.

 

In the US, Gor’kov continued his creative activity in a variety of areas of condensed matter physics and superconductivity. Alone in the period of 1998 to 2016 he authored or co-authored well over 50 papers and four book chapters. His most recent interests in superconductivity included a variety of subjects such as superconductivity at interfaces, superconductivity in sulphur hydrides under high pressures, cuprates, pnictides and others.

 

Gor'kov had been the recipient of many prestigious awards and honors throughout his illustrious career including the Lenin Prize, Soviet's highest award for scientific achievement in 1966, the Landau Award in 1989, the Bardeen Award in 1991, the Humbolt Research Award in 1998, the Eugene Feenberg Medal for advancing the field of many-body physics in 2004 and in 2015 the Ugo Fano Prize awarded by the Rome International Center for Materials Science.  He became a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1966, a full member in 1987 and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2005.  He achieved Fellow of the American Physical Society (1997) and held honorary doctorates at the City University of New York (1989) and the University of Illinois (1992).

 

The MagLab Director, Greg Boebinger, wrote in early January 2017: "Lev was a man whose scientific accomplishments are known and admired by the physics community and whose gentle personality and keen sense of humor are equally appreciated by those fortunate enough to have known him personally".

  ¹Soviet/Russian degree “Kandidat Nauk“, i.e., Science Candidate.
  ²Now a Russian “Science City“, less than 45 km northeast from Moscow.
  ³Now the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics.

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Leszek Motowidlo, 1951 - 2016

December 19, 2016 (PO50).  Dr. Leszek (Lesh) Motowidlo, 65, of Southington Connecticut ended his battle with cancer, September 21, 2016 in Connecticut, USA.  He was the husband of Diane Motowidlo.

 

Born on February 5, 1951 in Chambon-Feugerolles, France, he was the son of Gracjan and Jeanine Motowidlo of New Britain. His family immigrated with him to the United States in 1955. Lesh began his journey in applied physics with studies at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU). He then went on to the University of Connecticut and received his M.S. in Physics in 1976 and his Ph.D. in Metallurgy in 1981 under the supervision of Dr. James Galligan. Leszek received the distinguished Alumni Award from the UCONN School of Engineering in 1996 for his outstanding contributions

to both the science and engineering applications of superconducting materials. He gave the DeVivo Lecture in Materials Science 1993 at Northeastern University. He was a member of Sigma Xi Research Society, the New York Academy of Science 2000, and the Academy of Distinguished Engineers 1996.

 

Lesh contributed over 35 years to research, development and manufacture in the superconductivity and low-temperature communities. He first joined Varian Associates and served as Visiting Scientist at MIT working with John Williams on superconducting magnet development. He maintained ties to Connecticut throughout his career, starting from work at the University of Connecticut on mechanical properties of lead at liquid helium temperature, and continuing through his association with Intermagnetics General Corporation (IGC), Supercon, and his subsequent venture as founder and CEO of SupraMagnetics.  His body of work reflects an understanding of solid state physics, which he applied to produce numerous innovations in practical superconducting wires. His achievements as an innovator and entrepreneur are matched well by his contributions as a scientist.

Working in the late 1980s with Mike Walker and Bruce Zeitlin, Lesh pioneered artificial pinning-center (APC) conductors by co-fabricating niobium and Nb-Ti into homogeneous multi-component nanostructures. The concept of assembling the intended nanostructure by hand at a much larger size provided control over the fraction and arrangement of flux-pinning centers, whereby significantly higher critical current could be achieved than by random precipitates. This work continued through the 1990s and 2000s and expanded to include other metals, including magnetic components such as nickel. An undulator magnet for a Brookhaven National Laboratory light source project was fabricated from one of the final APC conductors. Working with Mark Rudziak and Terence Wong at Supercon, an APC conductor using magnetic nickel-copper alloy pinning centers endures as having the highest measured critical current density of any Nb-Ti wire at the common benchmark of 5 T field and 4.2 K temperature, reaching above 5000 A/mm². For comparison, conventionally processed strands with α-Ti pinning centers achieved only up to 4000 A/mm²  while those used for magnets for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) achieved less than 3200 A/mm².

The advent of high-temperature superconductors motivated Lesh to take on challenges of conductors based on Bi-2212 and Bi-2223. Working in collaboration with Showa of Japan he developed 1st generation HTS wires with state-of-the-art J_c.  At IGC, Supercon, and SupraMagnetics, Lesh developed new approaches to powder-in-tube (PIT) technologies, where he developed innovations in milling, re-stacking, wire-drawing and other conductor processing. By the mid-1990s, Lesh and coworkers at IGC and the University of Wisconsin demonstrated Bi-2212 round wires with high current density using a partial melt process. A key insight noted that current density increased with reduction of the powder core diameter. Rutherford cables were manufactured from these conductors in the late 1990s by collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Processing improvements also led to long-length Bi-2223 conductors and prototype coils at IGC by 1993.

Through Supramagnetics, Lesh produced a hallmark Nb₃Sn product with a novel octagonal geometry. The design allowed the introduction of high-strength components at interstices, making it the only internally reinforced Nb₃Sn wire. He also successfully pioneered the use of Cu₅Sn₄ as a low-cost alternative to NbSn₂ powders typically used to make Nb₃Sn by the PIT route. The combination of uniform high quality Cu₅Sn₄ powders and the PIT design provided as excellent test bed for exploring alloying additions that could help increase the high-field performance of Nb₃Sn for future accelerator magnets beyond the field range of the LHC. In his final program supported by the US Department of Energy, he successfully showed that mixtures of SnO₂ and Cu₅Sn₄ powders could be used to form ZrO₂ precipitates in Nb-1Zr alloy tubes, which later resulted in Nb₃Sn layers with ultra-fine grain size and improved flux-pinning properties at high fields. In conjunction with successes at the Ohio State University, this final design contributes a scalable route to APC-Nb₃Sn, and it should continue to provide an economical test bed for the development of future low-cost high-field Nb₃Sn conductors. He was author or coauthor on over 120 papers, and was awarded 10 patents in superconducting materials.

Throughout his career, Lesh was an enthusiastic contributor to the High Energy Physics and Energy Efficiency conductor communities. He stood out for his positive, can-do attitude which inspired others to do their best. He was extremely creative as indicated by his patents and research ideas.  His regular presentations at the annual High Field Superconductor Workshops will be greatly missed.

Peter Komarek Passed Away

Peter’s extraordinary management skills were soon recognized and in 1981 he was appointed to the FZK Scientific and Technical Board. In 1986, Peter Komarek was officially appointed as the Director of the FZK ITEP and he earned another honorary professorship at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Science at the University Karlsruhe, Germany.

 

During his work at ITEP, Peter initiated and supported many groundbreaking activities in the field of applied superconductivity for high current applications. Among them were the successful tests in the TOSKA facility of the EURATOM LCT coil, the POLO coil, the ITER and the W7X prototype coils, the development of HTS high current leads for Fusion, the development of high field NMR coils and first SMES (Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage) demonstrators.  Immediately after the discovery of high temperature superconductivity (HTS), he supported applied materials research in his institute and HTS energy applications such as fault current limiters.

 

Peter devoted substantial time to serve the research community in fusion and cryogenics. He was also active in IEEE, serving for many years as Head of the Europe Technical Committee, IEEE Council on Superconductivity (IEEE CSC). Furthermore, he served many years as Editor of the journals “Cryogenics” and “Fusion Engineering and Design” and was president of the IEA (International Energy Agency) Agreement on the Assessment of High-­‐ temperature Superconductivity. As director of ITEP, he became member of the Board of the European Society of Applied Superconductivity (ESAS), for which he served as President from
2002 – 2006.

 

For his outstanding achievements in applied superconductivity Peter received many awards, among them the Heinrich Hertz Prize of the Baden-­‐Württemberg Energy Foundation, the Mendelssohn Award of the International Cryogenic Engineering Committee and the Austrian Wilhelm Exner Medal.   In 2001, he also became the third awardee worldwide of the IEEE Award for Continuing and Significant Contributions in the Field of Applied Superconductivity, Large Scale Applications.

 

In his private life, Peter devoted time to his loving family, played soccer and tennis in summer, and enjoyed winter skiing in the Austrian Alps. Very sadly, his two children passed away before him.  Although gravely ill for several years, Peter never lost his positive attitude and was attempting to follow the progress in his institute and research field. He is survived by his wife Gertrud.

 

Prof. Mathias Noe, Director, Institute of Technical Physics, KIT, Germany

Prof. Bernhard Holzhapfel, Co-Director, Institute of Technical Physics, KIT, Germany, and President of ESAS

Antonio della Corte, President, IEEE Council on Superconductivity

 

Eddie Man-Wai Leung, 1953-2016

adapted from Leung family obituary

December 13, 2016 (PO48).  Engineering physicist Eddie Man-Wai Leung succumbed to cancer on August 1, surrounded by family and friends in San Diego.  He was 62 years old. Leung is remembered for an early enthusiasm for education. He majored in both Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering at Queen’s University in Canada, graduating in 1976 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics.

 

His first job was at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, where he built the world’s second largest superconducting split solenoid (electromagnet) for the Chicago Cyclotron Magnet Conversion Project and received the international Russell B. Scott Cryogenic Engineering Award for outstanding research in cryogenic temperature techniques. 

It was during this time that Eddie also received his Master of Engineering Management from the Midwest College of Engineering in Lombard, IL.

 

Over the next two decades, Leung put his technical and management skills in superconducting magnet applications, maglev and sensors to use at various corporations in San Diego including General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and General Atomics. In 2000, Leung founded Magtec Engineering, where he worked on the design and construction of large superconducting magnets for the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Laboratory, the TRUST program (a project on advanced anti-terrorist sensors for the US Department of Homeland Security), and other smaller maglev and consulting projects. Leung also served as a member of the US Senate National Maglev Advisory Committee and California State Assemblyman Tom Connolly’s Transportation Task Force.

 

Leung is survived by his wife, Irene, his daughter, Alicia, and his brother, Nelson. He is remembered as a devoted husband and father; a fun-loving and inquisitive man with many interests and passions, and as a knowledgeable and gently persuasive member of the cryogenics community.

 

Published with permission. The original is published in Cold Facts; October 2016, Volume 32, Number 5; 36. (www.cryogenicsociety.org).

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Helen T. Edwards, 1936-2016

July 16, 2016 (PO47).  Helen T. Edwards, a distinguished particle accelerator physicist, was born in Detroit, Michigan, USA on May 27, 1936 and passed away on June 21, 2016 at the age of 80.

 

After attending the Madeira prep school in McLean, VA, USA, Helen studied physics at Cornell University, where she earned successively her bachelor’s, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees.  After graduating in 1966, she remained for four more years at Cornell, where she was a Research Associate at the 10 GeV Electron Synchrotron, initially working under Robert Wilson.  In 1970 she joined him at the Fermi National Laboratory, where he was the first Director.  She was immediately appointed Associate Head of the Booster Group and later Head of the Accelerator Division (1987-89).

 

Edwards was best known for leadership in the design, construction, commissioning and operation of the Tevatron, which for 25 years was the most powerful particle collider in the world. The Tevatron turned on in 1983 when it began delivering particle beams for Fermilab’s fixed-target experiments. It recorded its first proton-antiproton collisions in 1985 and was used to find the top quark in 1995 and the tau neutrino in 2000, two of the three fundamental particles discovered at Fermilab.  Today, Edwards is seen as one of the most vital contributors to the success of Fermilab over its five-decade history.  She was also deeply involved in the eventually abandoned project of the Superconducting Super Collider in Dallas, Texas (1989-92).  Although retired in 1992, she remained Guest Scientist at Fermilab until 2010.  In these years she made significant contributions to the development of high-gradient, superconducting linear accelerators as well as bright and intense electron sources.

 

The work on the Tevatron earned her the MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the Genius Grant, in 1988, and the National Medal of Technology in 1989. She also received the Department of Energy’s E.O. Lawrence Award and the Robert R. Wilson Prize of the American Physical Society.  She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the National Academy of Engineering. She was also a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

 

To all who knew her, Edwards was a force of nature. Her colleagues note her forward-thinking vision, her unrelenting determination to get things done and her penchant for coloring outside the lines when it came to solving problems.  She was also known for her astonishing intellect, working out complex scientific problems by relying almost entirely on her own knowledge, without having to resort to outside references.  The deep understanding of physics and her keen intuition was evident to everyone who knew her.

 

Edwards had a keen understanding of people and their strengths, with a knack for positioning them in roles where they would excel. She knew how to bring the right people together to carry out a project and how to encourage them to success.  In private life, she was a nature lover and is remembered as a very gentle and caring person.  Her kind nature extended to her friends and colleagues; she sincerely cared about people.

 

Compiled by SNF mostly from Fermilab News of June 27, 2016. For the full text of that online publication, see http://news.fnal.gov/2016/06/helen-edwards-visionary-behind-fermilabs-tevatron-dies/. 

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Konrad H. Fischer Remembered

June 1, 2016 (PO46).  Konrad H. Fischer, a theoretical physicist in areas of magnetism and superconductivity, passed away on May 3, 2016 in Jülich, Germany, after a long struggle with the Parkinson disease.  Konrad was born on October 11^th, 1929 in Premnitz, Brandenburg, Germany, and his career was somewhat unusual: he first became a qualified electrician (1950), and then earned a diploma in telecommunications at the Technical University Stuttgart (1955). Eventually, after two years of additional physics studies at Göttingen University, he became a doctoral student at the Technical University (RWTH) Aachen and KFA (now Research Center, FZJ) Jülich. 

 

In only two years he graduated in theoretical physics with an engineering doctorate. The years 1965 to 1967 he was as an Assistant Prof. at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA, working on superconductivity problems with John Bardeen. The rest of his career, until retiring in 1994, he spent at KFA/FZJ and RWTH, where he earned his venia legendi (habilitation) in 1970 and became APL Professor in 1976. Some of his Ph.D. students became renowned physicists.

 

While Konrad’s early and late interest included superconductivity, he has been best known for his work on Kondo effect and spin glasses; on the latter he co-authored a book [1]. His late interest became vortices in high-T_c superconductors [2]. After retiring, he served the superconductivity community for another 15 years as a reviewer of vortex matter papers for Physical Review and Phys. Rev. Letters.

 

Along with physics of solid state, classical music was Konrad’s life interest and passion, shared with his wife and transmitted to their five children. Both parents and children have been accomplished musicians, on some occasions even performing in public. By those who knew him well, Konrad will be fondly remembered  as an extremely kind and helpful colleague, teacher, and advisor.

 

Alex Braginski for FZJ-PGI colleagues: I thank Mrs. Gertie Fischer, the wife of the deceased, for providing biographic details and reference samples.

 

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Karl Gschneidner of Ames Laboratory Passed Away

May 23, 2016 (PO45).  Karl A. Gschneidner Jr., known internationally as Mr. Rare Earth, passed away on April 27, 2016, at the age of 85.  Gschneidner began work on his Ph.D. at Iowa State University (Ames, Iowa, USA) in 1955 while working as Ames Laboratory graduate researcher in metallurgy. After receiving his doctorate from Iowa State in 1957, he took a job in the Chemistry and Metallurgy Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, but returned to Ames in 1963. He formally retired from the Laboratory in January 2016, after a distinguished 60-year career that was dedicated to the study of rare-earth metals.

 

Among Gschneidner’s important contributions is one of major importance for magnetic refrigeration and cryogenics: the discovery in 1997 of the giant magnetocaloric effect in Gd₅(Si₂Ge₂) [1], which then lead to analogous discoveries in other rare earth compounds and alloys.  While dilution refrigerators largely supplanted adiabatic demagnetization at very low temperatures, the method remains of importance, e.g., in space applications.

Gschneidner was a Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University, a Senior Metallurgist at the Ames Laboratory, and the Chief Scientist of the Critical Materials Institute.  He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and earned a lengthy list of awards for his research.

 

A prolific writer, he published more than 544 articles in scientific journals and more than 170 chapters in books and conference proceedings.  As testament of the quality of his research, his published works have been cited an astonishing 19,013 times – an average of 328 citations per year over his career.  It was his renown as “Mr. Rare Earth” that led to the establishment of the Critical Materials Institute, a U.S. Department of Energy Innovation Hub located at the Ames Laboratory.  Gschneidner testified before a Congressional committee about the need for such a research center and later served as the first chief scientist for CMI.

 

[1] Pecharsky, V. K.; Gschneidner, Jr., K. A.  "Giant Magnetocaloric Effect in Gd₅(Si₂Ge₂)".  
      Phys. Rev. Lett. 78 (23) 4494. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.78.4494

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Colmar Hinnrichs, 1966-2016

 

Colmar's passion for electronics and micro controller programming started in school and followed him his whole life. Still during his PhD study, he co-founded the company Magnicon, in December 2000.  Magnicon started with a maintenance contract for a 62-channel MEG SQUID system at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf.  With Colmar's expertise in analog and digital electronics, Magnicon was able to receive in 2002 the first license from PTB for a direct coupled SQUID electronics design.  Other co-developments with PTB and in-house electronics developments under Colmar’s aegis followed soon, making Magnicon one of leading manufacturers of SQUID systems and measurement electronics.

 

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William E. "Bill" Keller, 1925 - 2015

March 30, 2016 (PO43).  William E. “Bill” Keller, a distinguished low-temperature physicist, leader in superconductivity-related activities and a Santa-Fe, New Mexico, USA, and a dedicated philanthropist passed away on December 31^st, 2015.

 

Bill was born in Cleveland, Ohio on March 11, 1925.  As a student he was active in wrestling and soccer, graduated from Harvard in 1945, Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and subsequently, in 1948, completed there his Ph.D. work in physical chemistry.   After a two years stint at the Ohio State University Cryogenic Laboratory he joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 1950 as a Staff Member in the Low Temperature Physics and Engineering Group.  In 1970, he was appointed that Group’s Leader and in 1985 Assistant “P” Division Leader.  He retired from LANL in 1989.

 

Bill's own important research and writings concentrated on low temperature physics, specifically properties of He³ and He⁴.  These activities are covered in the obituary published in “Cold Facts”, the magazine of the Cryogenic Society of America (CSA), and also in the Brief History of the Condensed Matter and Thermal Physics Group at LANL through 2006, to which we refer our readers.

 

In the early 1970s, a new national need gained attention in USA, and Bill’s group responded with energy R&D, a combination of fundamental research and technology development, including applications. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo triggered the widespread realization that US energy sources were being depleted and imported energy was undependable; furthermore, acid rain and other pollution became problematic.  Fundamental work under Bill’s direction included research on flux motion, losses, and pinning in Type II superconductors, dielectric breakdown at cryogenic temperatures, properties of A15 superconductors (e.g., Nb₃Ge), and the stability of superconductor/normal-metal composites, while applied efforts included the development of dc and ac superconducting power transmission lines, superconducting magnetic energy storage for electric utilities, a car fueled by cryogenic hydrogen, and cryogenic distillation purification of hydrogen isotopes for fusion-energy fuel.  Federal support for such energy R&D dropped abruptly in the early 1980s, but many of these developments are receiving renewed attention today.

 

Near the peak of these activities, Bill was the organizer and chairman of the very successful 1980 Applied Superconductivity Conference (ASC 1980) in Santa Fe, which in retrospect was also a farewell to Bernd Mathias, the renowned experimental researcher into superconducting materials, especially the A15.

 

After retiring from LANL Bill became an active philanthropist.  In 1993 he co-founded the Golden Apple Foundation of New Mexico for Excellence in Teaching.  He also joined the Board of Directors of the Santa Fe Community Foundation and served for 15 years holding several offices, mostly financial, within this organization.  Most recently, he was a Board Member of the Santa Fe Science Initiative, promoting scientific literacy in the schools of northern New Mexico.

 

Bill lived his life fully, loved his garden, traveled the world, enjoyed a round of golf, excelled at stock picking, savored good food, and used to finish his day with a shot of good single malt. He had a rich life, gave back plentifully to his community, family, and friends, and is missed by many. Bill is survived by his wife, four children, and two grandchildren.

 

This obituary is a compilation from the two documents linked above, the Obituary published in the “New Mexican” newspaper of January 10, 2016, and fond memories of Alex Braginski, who had the honor to serve as a consultant in Bill’s group in the late 1970’s and considered him a good friend and mentor.  We thank Laurie Huget, Executive Director of CSA, and Greg Swift of LANL, for their kind help and assistance by providing sources.

 

Robert John Soulen, Jr. - A Man of Many Passions

January 6, 2016 (PO42).  Robert John Soulen, Jr. succumbed to Parkinson’s disease on November 19, 2015 after more than a decade of struggle with the ailment. Robert (henceforth called “Bob”) was born in Phoenixville, PA on July 16, 1940. He attended Rutgers University and was granted a B. A. degree in physics in 1962. He was awarded a Ph. D. degree in physics by Rutgers in 1966. Bob married Rosemarie Vosseler while in graduate school.

    

At Rutgers, Bob was Prof. Peter Lindenfeld’s doctoral student, but he also benefitted from strong interactions with Prof. E. A. Lynton, Prof. William McLean, and Prof. Bernie Serin. Including Lindenfeld, they were known as the Rutgers Superconductivity Group. Under their tutelage, Bob became a master at making electrical and thermal transport measurements at cryogenic temperatures. This experience led Bob to accept an offer of a position in the Cryogenics Section of the Heat Division at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in 1968.

 

At NBS, Bob immediately began efforts to build or obtain commercially a ³He-⁴He dilution refrigerator (DR) that would eventually facilitate cryogenic studies at temperatures as low as 10 millikelvin (mK). While working on his refrigerator quest, Bob collaborated with James Schooley in the development of a temperature reference device for the range 0.5 K to 7 K (ultimately to 9 K). The device contained five (later six) carefully annealed wire samples all enclosed within sensor coils; thus, the operator could monitor all of the individual transitions in one experiment. NBS registered the device as Standard Reference Material No. 767. It proved to be very popular within the cryogenics community. In 1976, a new provisional international temperature scale was created by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (the French acronym is BIPM). The NBS SRM 767 device provided five of the eleven reference points on the scale.

 

Once his new refrigerator was operative, Bob developed another SRM, No.768, which could be used in the same fashion as the 767 device, but with five samples selected for the 16 mK to 200 mK range. Again, the SRM 768 offered easily observable, reproducible superconductive transitions for temperature references in a compact device.

 

Recognizing the significance of experimental work on noise thermometry performed in the NBS Boulder cryogenics laboratory during the late 1960s, Bob spent nearly twenty years applying the technique to the NBS low-temperature program. In this work, Bob collaborated with William Fogle and Jack Colwell, who were creating a composite temperature scale that involved the melting curve of ³He and the temperature dependence of paramagnetic salt susceptibility. The trio described their work in a pair of papers during a 1992 international temperature conference: “A new cryogenic temperature scale from 0.0063 K to 0.65 K” and “A decade of absolute noise thermometry at NIST using a resistive SQUID”.

 

Following the meeting in 1992, the three scientists decided to pursue an absolute temperature scale that would extend deep into the millikelvin range. Their intention was to marshal all available very-low-temperature methods into one laboratory experiment, so as to minimize the level of experimental uncertainty. The results of this effort were encouraging. They recorded all of the experimental and theoretical progress in a 102-page paper that they published in the Journal of Low Temperature Physics. The paper included a thorough discussion of their resistively biased use of the Josephson junction and their experimental comparisons of temperature as derived from the SRM 768, from the SQUID-based noise thermometer, from the 1976 provisional temperature scale, and from the ³He melting-curve results. Their work provided much of the basis for the international 2000 Provisional Low Temperature Scale from 0.9 mK to 1 K.

 

Bob’s scientific reputation for excellence in his research grew throughout the cryogenics community as time went on. An adept experimenter, Bob also sought an understanding of the theoretical basis for his laboratory work. He was able in many cases to extend existing theory to new laboratory regimes. Bob received the 1976 NBS E. U. Condon Award, the 1979 Department of Commerce Gold Medal (shared with James Schooley), and the 2002 American Physical Society Joseph F. Keithley Award for Advances in Measurement Science. The Keithley citation read “For developing low temperature noise thermometry to achieve an absolute thermometer which now defines the 2000 Provisional Low Temperature Scale between 1 mK and 1 K to an accuracy of 0.1 % and for other significant contributions to temperature measurement over a distinguished career”.

 

Shortly after the discovery of high temperature superconductivity (HTS) in 1986, Bob moved to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), although he still participated in the cryogenic thermometry effort at NBS/NIST in his “spare time”. Bob wanted to focus more intently on research in HTS. He brought with him his skills as a researcher and a leader. He quickly established a program focused first on vortex dynamics and the unusual behavior of the HTS materials in intense magnetic fields. Then, using his experience in noise thermometry, he turned to tunneling into magnetic and superconducting materials to gain a better understanding of the fundamentals of the superconducting state.

 

Although Bob spent the bulk of his career studying superconductivity, one of his major accomplishments in another area led to his most-cited scientific paper. Utilizing his knowledge of superconducting point contacts, he examined spin-polarized transport in magnetic metals. Motivated by a suggestion by Jeff Byers, a theory post-doc in his group, he performed a ground-breaking experiment that observed the transport of superconducting Cooper pairs into magnetic metals (Andreev scattering) that became a standard technique in the study of spin polarization in magnetic metals, including some novel materials called half magnets. Published in the journal Science, the paper, on which he was the lead author, has been cited more than 1000 times.

 

Bob and his colleagues also related their laboratory work to practical matters, including critical-current measurements, ac losses in superconducting tapes, and device characterization in the high-temperature superconducting space experiments (HTSSE).

 

Because of his inherent managerial ability, Bob was asked to head the NRL Material Physics Branch, with responsibility for directing research in magnetic materials, sensor materials, and materials synthesis and characterization. Administration was not Bob’s “cup of tea”, but his leadership in the multidisciplinary physics area was successful over a period of several years before he decided to return to his laboratory studies.

 

Bob’s calm demeanor masked his many passions, his drive, and a well developed sense of humor. Besides physics, he enjoyed softball, fly fishing, fine wines, and good cigars. He shared his hobbies with family and friends, especially fishing and softball. His sense of humor once brought him to make a presentation while wearing hip waders during a laboratory review. The program manager had emphasized “come as you are” dress for the review, and Bob took her at her word. 

 

For years, Bob and several colleagues enjoyed running at lunchtime.  These events came to be known as “Bob runs”, because the group often slowed to a walk while discussing family matters, recollections from his trips to China and Finland, details of tying fishing lures, and, of course, physics.  In a single “run”, it was not unusual for the conversation to include electron-phonon interactions, woolly bears (fuzzy caterpillars), and Voltaire.

 

Bob is survived by his wife of 52 years, Rosemarie, by two daughters, Stephanie Harrington and Heidi Clark, and by three grandsons, Michael, Trevor, and Henry.  In the early 1970s Bob and Rosemarie lost an infant son, Robert John Soulen III.

 

As noted above, Bob contracted Parkinson’s disease more than a decade ago, but he refused to capitulate to the ailment even as its symptoms became debilitating.   An article in the Washington Post (June 29, 2010) described Bob’s devotion to softball during the later stages of his affliction.  He used a walker to approach home plate in games played in the 60-and-older Senior Montgomery County Softball League; he was a designated hitter in the lineups for both teams.  Even as the Parkinson’s disease progressed to its final stages, Bob wrote two books (self-published on Amazon) about his passion for softball and fly fishing.

 

Bob also continued to exercise his hobby of tying fishing flies, using feathers obtained from birds.  The feathers also found places on the covers of specialty cigar boxes that he decorated for friends, and as components of artistic bird montages.  We will not soon forget his scientific abilities, his friendship, his wit, his passion for life, and his courage in the face of certain death.  We grieve for his family, but we rejoice in the life that he led.

 

These notes were written by Jim Schooley, Don Gubser, Mike Osofsky, Boris Nadgorny, Bill Fogle, and Stu Wolf.  We thank Keith Martin, librarian at NIST, for providing the reference to the Washington Post.

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Herbert Bousack, 1953 - 2015

December 15, 2015 (PO41).  Dr. Eng. Herbert Bousack was born on June 10, 1953, in Aachen, Germany, and it was there he succumbed to a rather sudden cancer on November 13, 2015.  He completed his doctorate in mechanical engineering in 1981.  After graduation he became member of staff at the Research Center Juelich (FZJ), Germany, and was employed there until his untimely death.

    

Herbert’s contribution to applied superconductivity was limited to the period 1990 to 1999, but it was significant.  He organized and led the SQUID development and applications group, which under his guidance grew fast to become one of the two leading project of the whole FZJ and one of the most successful such activities worldwide. It concentrated on the development of high-T_c (HTS) rf SQUIDs and their application in three areas of biomagnetism, nondestructive evaluation (NDE) of metallic structures and geophysical exploration. In these years, several of the then “world’s first” originated under Herbert's direction, including both the matured HTS rf SQUID in the form it is practiced today and the first application of SQUIDs to airplane structure testing, which was licensed to a renowned airplane engine manufacturer and used in practice.  All application projects were conducted in direct collaboration with industry or test organizations.  Reorganization of the institute, in which all these activities were located, terminated most of the SQUID activities in or immediately after 1999.

 

Herbert’s personal technical involvement focused mostly on NDE of steel-reinforced concrete bridges.  That specific development program was immensely successful, but eventually not implemented for cost reasons:  the data interpretation methodology conceived in this project was so effective that is allowed to eventually replace the mobile SQUID systems by less sensitive and cheaper room-temperature sensors.

 

As a team leader, Herbert excelled by his extraordinary ability to communicate, motivate and create a team spirit with a special human sensitivity and touch in personal relationships.  In private life he was, among others, a passionate biker and active friend of animals.

 

Herbert Bousack will be well remembered and deeply missed by his former collaborators and colleagues.  Let him rest in peace.

 

Alex Braginski, H. Joachim Krause, and Yi Zhang

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William Brownfield Fowler Remembered

October 13, 2015 (PO40).  Dr. William Brownfield Fowler passed away peacefully in St. Charles, Illinois, on May 3, 2015, aged 91.  He was an internationally recognized expert in the fields of high-energy particle physics, superconducting magnets, cryogenic bubble chambers, and diffusion cloud chambers.

 

Born on March 22, 1924 in Owensboro, KY, he graduated from Lafayette High School in Lexington, Kentucky, after which he enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps during WW-II and was trained as a radio operator. He obtained a B.A. in physics from University of Kentucky in Lexington in 1947. In 1951, he received a Ph.D. in physics from the Washington University, St. Louis, MO, after researching cosmic rays at the Climax Mine in Colorado. Next, he went to the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, Long Island, NY, to perform post-doctoral research that used diffusion cloud chambers to discover "strange" particles at BNLs Cosmotron. He then went to the University of California, Berkeley, as an assistant professor, 1955 - 1959. At Berkeley he and others used newly developed bubble chamber technology to discover and study new "strange"particles, such as Cascade- baryons.  After that academic stint he took a staff position at BNL where he remained until 1969. While at BNL, he and others constructed the 80 inch, cryogenic-hydrogen bubble chamber, which was eventually used to discover the Omega- particle in 1963. In 1969 he took a position at the newly opened National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), in Batavia, Illinois, where he remained until he retired in 2002 at the age of 78.  He further maintained scientific connection with the Lab until February 2015. 

Professor Harry Jones – Scientist and Educator

 October 6, 2015 (PO39).  Professor Harry (Henry) Jones CSci, CEng, CPhys, FInstP, MIET, who has died aged 70 on 24^th August, 2015, was a Professor of Condensed Matter Physics at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University.  He worked there for 44 years until his retirement in 2012. He led the High Magnetic Fields and Superconductivity group for nearly 30 years which was de facto the UK National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and during that time supervised 14 PhD students and 10 post-doctoral researchers. He was an inspirational colleague and researcher. At Oxford University, his main research interests were in High Magnetic Fields, Superconductivity and Cryogenics.  As a research supervisor and leader, he brought with him an intense curiosity and drive to discover new and useful science, as well as a strong personal warmth and good humour. 

 

Harry was born on the 14th February, 1945. He grew up in Lincolnshire and attended The Havelock Grammar School in Grimsby. He was recruited by the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell and after his training. posted to the Electronics and Applied Physics Division.  In 1968, he joined the Magnet Group at Oxford University under Professor Kurti, FRS.  Harry helped to equip the laboratory with superconducting magnets that including the celebrated multi-user mobile 16.5 T magnet system that was the world's first superconducting magnet above 15 T as well as the world's first operational hybrid magnet. Harry was one of Europe's leading scientists producing pulsed magnetic fields. In 1987, he pioneered the development of a unique high strength composite copper and steel conductor that broke the 50 tesla barrier for pulsed fields and eventually lead to the world's first non-destructive measurements in magnetic fields above 75 Tesla. His many invited seminars and fellowships enabled international colleagues to invite him to help develop the strategy for higher pulsed fields in Europe, Japan and the USA. He was always interested in developing novel difficult measurements and was recognized as one of the world's experts for accurate measurements of the critical current density (J_c(B,T)) and induced resistive transition (IRT) of both low temperature and high temperature superconductors.

 

Harry served on numerous technical committees and produced over 150, refereed scientific publications.  From 2005, he served for a decade as Chairman of the British Cryogenics Council and served on the committee of the UK Magnetics Society from 2010. These interests echoed the strong collaborations with industry he pursued throughout his career. He was also Chairman of The Scientific and Advisory Committee HMFL at Dresden and the Europe-US 100 T council.

 

Harry is remembered with affection by his friends and colleagues and will be greatly missed. He is survived by Linda, his wife and life-time love and companion.

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Viktor Efimovich Keilin, 1933 -2014

 

 

resonance.  From the very beginning, Viktor was involved in a new area at that time: applied superconductivity. His scientific ingenuity, technical creativity, dedication, and wisdom resulted in outstanding achievements. The Kurchatov team  developed under his leadership classic cryogenic configurations for large superconducting magnets, including current leads that can carry high currents, and established principles for designing partially-stabilized superconducting magnets. Independent of the Oak Ridge team, he introduced the cable-in-conduit approach. Ideas of Prof. Keilin were successfully demonstrated in the world-first tokamak T-7 with superconducting coil system for generation of the toroidal field (1979), and in tokamak T-15 with Nb₃Sn windings (1988). With upgrades and modifications, principles developed by him and his associates are used in designing superconducting magnets for ITER.

 

Viktor was always dreaming about efficient, easy-maintenance, relatively inexpensive superconducting magnets for diverse applications. The Kurchatov team built hundreds of magnets for gyrotrons, wigglers, high-field applications, etc. He lead developments that were used in such unique facilities as SST-1 (India), HT-7 (China), KSTAR (Korea), ATLAS (CERN). He inspired Russian efforts in HTS including development of superconducting transmission and distribution cables, fault current limiters, HTS leads for collider NICA (Dubna, Russia) and other projects. He was awarded two very prestigious USSR State Prizes, in 1976 and 1988.

 

Viktor Efimovich Keilin was also famous for attracting cohorts of young scientists to applied superconductivity. His positive attitude towards life, inexhaustible enthusiasm and energy, endless optimism and sense of humor attracted a lot of young people into the field. He had a map where he marked countries where his former students have been working. These included Russia, Ukraine, USA, Germany, Japan, England, Netherlands and many others. He was a professor at the Moscow Institute of Engineering Physics and supervised dozens of PhD students.  For more than 30 years, he lead the annual school of superconductivity in Protvino near Moscow. It is not easy to find a Russian scientist or engineer in the field of superconductivity who did not attend this school at least once. Most of his students have been staying in the field during their whole career.

 

All of us who knew this outstanding man feel a great personal loss. At the same time, memory of Prof. Keilin will continue encouraging us towards new achievements in applications of superconductivity.
 

Colleagues at I.V. Kurchatov Institute and M. Parizh, GE, Schenectady, NY, USA

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Koichi Kitazawa Remembered

December 12, 2014 (PO37U).  Koichi Kitazawa, a materials scientist prominent in high-T_c superconductivity, former president of Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and president of Tokyo City University, passed away on September 26, 2014, at the age of 71.  He was born on April 17, 1943 at Iiyama in Nagano prefecture, Japan.  After obtaining the BS degree in chemistry at the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science of the University of Tokyo, in 1966 he became graduate student in Professor Mukaibo’s laboratory, Department of Industrial Chemistry of the Faculty of Engineering at the same university, and got his master degree there in 1968.  Finally, in 1972, he earned the D.Sc. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Materials Science.  In 1973, he joined the University of Tokyo as research associate, lecturer (~1979), associate professor (~1982) and professor (~1987 to 2002). Early in the 2^nd decade of his 30 years career at the University of Tokyo, he started studies on superconductivity of Ba(Bi,Pb)O₃ at Professor Tanaka’s laboratory and as the first in the world verified high-T_c superconductivity at and above 30 K occurring in La-Ba-Cu-O system, thus confirming the discovery of Bednorz and Mueller.  

 

Jun-ichi Shimoyama (Department of Applied Chemistry, The University of Tokyo)

 

¹This term encompasses studies of effects of strong magnetic fields on various processes involving inorganic crystals or organic and biological paramagnetic molecules.  An example of the latter is the effect on the growth of various plants.

²The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Shinya Yamanaka, a stem cell researcher, for his ground-breaking research on IPS (Induced Pluripotent Stem) cells.

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Werner Weber Remembered

October 10, 2014 (PO36).  Werner Weber, professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the Technical University of Dortmund (TUD), Germany, died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home on 3rd of July 2014.
 

Werner was born on 6th of August, 1945, in Bad Urach, Germany, and studied physics at the Munich Technical University, 1964-1970.  Two years later (1972) he earned his PhD on “Lattice Dynamics in Hard Materials and Transition Metals”, a broad subject absorbing him for most of his scientific career.  In August 1972 he joined Max Planck Institute of Solid State Physics in Stuttgart, Germany, where he remained until 1977. His  study of that period on "Adiabatic bond charge model for phonons in diamond, Si, Ge, and α-Sn“ (1977) has been  one of his most cited publicationsⁱ.It appeared in print during his two-years-long research stint at Bell Laboratories, where he collaborated closely with Chandra Varma on reformulating the problem of lattice dynamics in 

transition metals and applying to understand the phonon anomalies discovered more than 15 years earlier by neutron scattering. They showed that the traditional views of phonon anomalies as due to nesting, (W. Kohn and A. Overhauser), needed a serious modification. The modification was the momentum-dependence introduced by local field effects. They found an easy way to include them by using moving tight binding orbitalsⁱⁱ.  When Werner went back to Germany, he extended this method to various transition metal compounds. All this resulted in a firm quantitative understanding of electron-phonon effects in strong-coupling superconductors.

 

In 1977 Werner assumed a tenured position the Research Center Karlsruhe and subsequently, in 1983, earned his “habilitation” (a DSc equivalent) at the Karlsruhe Technical University.  In mid-1980s (probably 1985-1987) he went again to Bell Labs, where, among other projects, he worked with Varma and a graduate student, Lisa Randall, on application of the Gutzwiller methods to multi-band problems, such as heavy-Fermion compoundsⁱⁱⁱ and with L. Mattheiss and by himself on high temperature superconductivity, both widely cited studies^iv.  This was immediately after the discovery of high critical temperatures in cuprates, which exceeded theoretical expectations based on the electron-phonon interaction.  Soon thereafter, in 1989, Werner was appointed to the “Chair of Theoretical Physics II” at TUD, which he occupied until his retirement in 2010.
 

The overall goal of Werner’s efforts was in that period to combine the band theory with the Gutzwiller’s many particle method, which satisfactorily describes 3d and 4d electrons in transition metals.  Indeed, in 1996, he and his PhD student Joerg Buenemann, succeeded in a generalization for multiband systems.  Werner’s last work in correlations physics was to lay formal basis for the Gutzweiler theory of density functional.   His fervent hope was its further development and application.
 

In 2009 Werner became interested in climate change and in 2010 contributed a publication on „Strong signature of the active Sun in 100 years of terrestrial insolation data“, proposing that formation of aerosols due to cosmic radiation contributes to solar energy delivery to Earth’s surface thus decisively affecting the climate^v.  This work, representing a minority point of view, was seriously debated in the climatologist community.
 

At TUD, Werner was an engaged faculty member, twice a Dean, and in his last years there also interim Director of the TUD Center of Synchrotron Radiation (DELTA), a research and training facility.   After his retirement he remained very involved, especially in shaping and promoting a new TUD Bachelor and Master study in medical physics.  This was prompted in part by his participation in a successful industrial venture (Cryoelectra) developing and manufacturing critical components for superconducting synchrotron accelerator systems designed for clinical proton therapy of cancer.
 

His colleagues and collaborators remember him as warm hearted person and a scientist never satisfied by standard answers while striving at uncovering the real correlations.  He was a great mentor, wonderful colleague and friend.  We’ll all miss him.

Florian Gebhard, Frithjof Anders, Jörg Fink, Ulrich Eckern, Roser Valenti at TUD, Chandra Varma at UC Riverside, USA, and Alex Braginski at Research Center Juelich, Germany

ⁱW. Weber,  Phys. Rev. B , 15, 4789 (1977). 

ⁱⁱC.M. Varma and W. Weber, Phys. Rev. B, 19, 6142 (1979).

ⁱⁱⁱC.M. Varma, W. Weber and L.J. Randall, Phys. Rev. B, 33, 1015 (1986).

^ivW. Weber, Phys. Rev. Lett. 58, 1371 (1987).

^v W. Weber, Ann. Phys. 552,6, 372-381 (2010).

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Hans HIllmann Remembered

 

September 10, 2014 (PO35).  Hans Hillmann, a prominent superconducting materials scientist and consummate artist, passed away on February 6, 2014, at almost 92.  He was born on February 15, 1922 in Ronneburg, Thuringia, Germany.  Shortly after WW II, he started his career initially as a teacher of art, mathematics and physics (1946-1956), while nearly simultaneously studying physics as an extern at the Technical University of Dresden, Saxony, Germany (1952-1957).  Upon graduating with a diploma, he became there a Scientific Assistant at the Institute for X-Ray Science and Metal Physics.  

 

In 1959 Hans successfully moved from East Germany to the West and immediately got hired by Vacuumschmelze GmbH (VAC) in Hanau, West Germany, to work in their R&D laboratory.VAC was then a prominent manufacturer of high quality specialty metals and alloys, especially soft magnetic 

 

Hans Hillmann, 2008

alloys. Shortly thereafter, in 1961, Gene Kunzler of Bell Labs demonstrated high critical current at 8 tesla in Nb₃Sn and the first worldwide “gold rush” into fabricating superconducting wires of more ductile alloys began, first of NbZr soon superseded by NbTi. Naturally, Vacuumschmelze joined the fray and so Hans got involved into superconductivity of materials and conductors, over the years making and publishing multiple important contributions to the science and technology of NbZr, NbTi and Nb₃Sn.  He worked on these over the rest of his scientific career.  Nevertheless, the breadth of his interest and the experience with difficult to process NbZr led Hans to contribute also in other areas.  

 

As an example can serve - developed by him - the first nonmagnetic watch springs with temperature-independent E modulus, which found application in expensive mechanical watches.  Soon after, the technology of such springs fell in oblivion due to the rapid spread of quartz watches.  Only decades later, with Hans long retired, very expensive mechanical watches had their renaissance and Swiss manufacturers were desperate to find a source of appropriate springs.  Hans was the only remaining repository of spring know-how.  He faced the challenge, jumped into action and reconstituted the technology.  Today, a very expensive Swiss watch is likely to contain a spring „Made by Hans Hillmann“.

 

In 1974 he defended his doctoral dissertation on "Micro-Structural Principles of Flux Pinning in NbTi" with Prof. W. Buckel as advisor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, and in the same year was awarded the prestigious Tammann Medal by the German Metallurgy Society.  That award was for his pioneering work in the field of hard (Type II) superconductors.  Hans retired in 1988, but continued publishing and consulting while simultaneously pursuing his artistic activities as painter and exhibitor at art galleries and museums.

 

Most remarkable was Hans’s gift to be able to see any problem as a whole with all its ramifications and extrapolations into the future.  He participated in many European projects and toward the end of his career he was responsible for all the superconducting R&D activity at VAC.  During the more than 26 years of his work in this area, his main focus - next to performing basic research on high-current and high-field superconductor technology - was to transform laboratory results into technically usable NbTi and Nb3Sn commercial products. He contributed largely to the early stages of industrial manufacturing of superconductors at VAC.  Particularly vital was his insistence on understanding technical superconductors in the complex nanostructured forms in which they had to be used.  He was a delightful colleague, not at all narrow-minded in any commercial sense, because he always seemed motivated by the belief that better superconductors would increase the market for all.  This spirit certainly made VAC one of the leading companies worldwide, a situation still true today decades after his retirement when it is now owned by Bruker EAS, but still at Hanau, Germany.

 

Hans’s art gene was nurtured by his early professional activity of math, physics and art teacher, as documented by his exceptional drawings and sketches of experimental equipment.  The esthetics of mathematics and superconductor physics was visualized in his multiple paintings inspired by images of physical effects.

 

Hans has been an exceptional personality in the superconductivity community.  To have him among us was a special gift. We’ll cherish his memory.

 

Colleagues and friends at Bruker, David Larbalestier at NHMFL and Alex Braginski at Research Center Juelich

 

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Henry Blosser, 1928-2013

August 4, 2014 (PO34).  Henry Blosser passed away in March of 2013 at the age of 85.

 

Henry received his bachelor’s degree, master's degree, and his PhD from the University of Virginia.  From 1954 to 1958 he worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He served as founding director and co-director of the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State University (MSU) from 1958 until his retirement in 1989.  He was also an adjunct professor in the Wayne State University Department of Radiation Oncology in Detroit. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1973-74. In 1994 the American Physical Society awarded him the Tom W. Bonner Award for his contributions to nuclear physics. In 1984 the Detroit News named him "Michiganian of the year."

 

 

     
Henry Blosser in 2007

 

Henry was an innovator who supervised the construction of two superconducting cyclotrons at NSCL beginning in 1978 and into the 1980’s.  These cyclotrons are still accelerating heavy ions at MSU.   He also built a superconducting medical cyclotron for neutron therapy for use in a Detroit-area hospital.  This cyclotron was used to treat patients from 1992 until 2012.   It was the only such facility in the United States.

Michael Wulf Belatedly Remembered

July 7, 2014 (PO33).  Michael Wulf was
born on May 9, 1978 in Hamburg
and died unexpectedly at 34,
presumably on November 16, 2012.  

 

He studied physics at the Hamburg University, Germany (1997-2000), the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, (2000-2001) and University of Rochester, NY, USA,
where in 2002 he earned his M.A. Subsequently, he worked there until 2006 towards a Ph.D.in the field of qubits and quantum computing control circuitry (RSFQ) utilizingsuperconducting devices.  In particular, together with colleagues from Rochester, he published a very interesting paper about possible application of underdampedJosephson junctions in RSFQ comparators for the Josephson qubit readout (IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond. 13, 974, 2003). His Ph.D. dissertation was planned that time to be on the subject of Steps Towards Superconducting Quantum Computing utilizing superconducting electronics.

 

In 2006 he moved to PTB Braunschweig, Germany (the German National Metrology Institute), to work in the Quantum Electronics Department on adaptation of cryo-electronic devices for qubit manipulation. He was involved in several EU research projects on superconducting quantum computation. Parallel to this research, he was very much engaged in the study of single electron circuits for application to electrical standards, especially the error statistics in networks of such devices.  Eventually, he conceived the brilliant error accounting concept for practical realization of the quantum standard of electric current based on single electron tunneling (Phys. Rev. B 87, 035312, 2013 – the paper appeared after his death).  Practical realization of this idea became the main and quite ambitious goal of his scientific life and, suddenly, the new theme of his PhD work. His first attempts to make such experiment using all-metallic circuits (Al electron pumps integrated with Al single electron transistors operated as electrometers) were not as successful as expected.  Consequently, to implement this idea, Michael moved in 2012 within PTB to the Semiconductors and Magnetism Department to work on GaAs single-electron pumps for the future quantum current standard.  The experimental work within that group, supported by his colleagues from Quantum Electronics Department (they complemented the semiconductor circuits with Al single electron electrometers) relatively soon resulted in a successful practical implementation of the concept, with Michael as a posthumous co-author (Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 226803, 2014).  That work was in 2014 awarded the prestigious Helmholtz Prize. Unfortunately he hadn't lived long enough to share this prize with the other awardees.

 

Not much is known about Michael’s private life and hobbies, probably because science itself was his main hobby. Still, we remember that he was an avid cyclist and had multiple interests, ranging from classical music and literature to economics and politics.  His friends and co-workers remember having with him many discussions on such subjects during the ongoing measurements.  At the same time he disliked unavoidable bureaucracy and boring paperwork, today an inseparable supplement of every active scientist’s research.  He was interested in people, treated others with interest, respect and in a friendly manner, sometime with fine humor, while not hesitating to express his convictions and put right questions at the right time, thus moving things forward.

 

Olga L. Polushenko, 1942 – 2014

June 30, 2014 (PO32).  Olga Leonidowna Polushenko was born on October 8^th, 1942 in the Voronesh region and passed away after a severe illness on March 4^th, 2014.  She graduated from the famous Moscow State Technical University (named after N.E. Bauman, Russian acronym MGTU), in 1965 and earned her Ph.D. degree (Russian “candidate of sciences”) in 1973 for a study on hot pressing of ferrites, also from MGTU.  While her early research was in powder metallurgy of electronic and magnetic materials, she became deeply involved in R&D of superconducting materials since the advent of high-T_c superconducting (HTS) cuprates in 1986. Olga remained at MGTU and became there a “docent” (equivalent to Associate Professor) combining teaching and research activities. 

 

Over the past 28 years, her interest concentrated on bulk HTS technology, suitable for fabrication of high-strength cryogenic magnets.  The excellent properties of her bulk materials 

   

 

enabled the construction of first Russian HTS superconducting motors with excellent characteristics.  Recently, she made a major contribution to the development of superconducting bearings for the kinetic energy storage (under a “Rosatom” program).

 

Olga authored over 40 scientific publications and had 6 Russian patents to her credit.  Her friends remember her not only as a scientist and “a patriot of Russian superconductivity”, but also as a remarkable and wonderful person.  Many remember her also as an excellent culinary chef, especially remembered by her unforgettable tort cakes.  She’ll remain in the hearts of her many collaborators and friends.  Olga didn’t leave behind any family.

 

(Written by SNF based in part on an obituary in Russian published by N. Nizhel’skiy for friends of Olga Poluschenko in the online Superconductors in Electric Power Industry published by the Moscow Kurchatov Institute, a Russian National Research Center, http://www.nrcki.ru/ and http://perst.isssph.kiae.ru/supercond/news.php?id=1109).

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Nicola Sacchetti, 1936 - 2014

 

June 24, 2014 (PO31).  Nicola Sacchetti was born in Florence (Italy) on April 5^th, 1936 and died in Frascati (Italy) on the 1^st of February 2014.  He will be remembered as one of the pioneers in applied superconductivity, not only in Italy and Europe, but also in the U.S. and Japan.  His ability in communicating knowledge and enthusiasm to young researchers made him one of the best teachers one could have met.

 

Born in Florence in 1936, he graduated in Physics at Genoa University in 1960.  In 1962, soon after the completion of his master thesis, he joined the Magnet Group of the Frascati National Laboratory in Frascati, coordinated at that time by the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, INFN. 

 

 

         

 

His initial scientific activity, until 1970, was already devoted to physics of superconductivity, specifically the tunneling effect. He was among the first to develop tunnel junctions in Italy.  Independently of it created a prototype installation for the production of Nb₃Sn tape conductor based on liquid tin diffusion.  In the same years he became involved in the completion of several superconducting magnets, among which the Nb₃Sn solenoid able to produce the magnetic field of 11T in a volume then large enough for experimental purposes.  In the following years, Nicola also started efforts to ignite interest in applied superconductivity at Italian industries such as Ansaldo and LMI.

 

Hiroshi Maeda, 1936-2014

 

June 12, 2014 (PO30).  Dr. Hiroshi Maeda, the discoverer of Bi-Sr-Ca-Cu-O high-T_c superconducting cuprate compounds, passed away on May 24, 2014, at the age of 78.  His contribution to applied superconductivity community is enormous. Especially, his discovery of Bi₂Sr₂Ca₂Cu₃Ox (Bi-2223) and Bi₂Sr₂CaCu₂Oy (Bi-2212) opened the door to many high-temperature superconducting (HTS) applications, such as transmission cables, motors, high field magnets, and so on.

 

He was born in Fukui, Japan (1936). After finishing a B.S. in 1958 at the Department of Physics, Kanazawa University, he joined the National Research Institute for Metals (now NIMS) and started his research on magnetic materials. His major research achievement in this field was the development of high performance thin films for magnetic disks. He received a doctorate in science from Hiroshima University in 1971. His first involvement in superconducting and cryogenic technology 

was his research on magnetic refrigeration materiasl and systems, beginning in 1981. In 1985, he was promoted to group leader of the Superconducting and Cryogenic Materials Research Group and began research on superconducting materials. 

 

The discovery of HTS oxide stimulated his own research as a material scientist and he started exploring new HTS compounds, which he has been synthesizing by himself. By the end of 1987 he succeeded in synthesizing Bi-Sr-Ca-Cu-O and found superconductivity at 105 K. His article reporting on this new HTS family was published at the beginning of 1988. Since then many researchers worldwide followed his path pursued both fundamental and application studies of these and similar compounds. 

 

His discovery of Bi-cuprates high-T_c was honored with many prizes, such as the Tsukuba Prize (1989), Matthias Prize (1991), and other. In 1993, the Tsukuba Magnet Laboratory (TML) was founded as a part of NIMS and he became TML’s director. In the same year, he assumed the additional position of a professor at the Graduate School of Pure and Applied Science, University of Tsukuba (operated jointly by NIMS and University of Tsukuba).  

 

After retiring from NIMS in 1996, he continued his research and educational work as a professor at the Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University (1996–99) and Kitami Institute of Technology (1999–2002). He also made a stint at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Tallahassee, USA (2001–03).

 

He contributed to applied superconductivity community activities also by serving as a Board Member of the International Cryogenic Materials Conference and the Cryogenics and Superconductivity Society of Japan.

 

His private passion was tennis and he was, indeed, a very good player.  He could be found on a tennis court most every weekend.

 

One day in 1983, he played tennis with the Japanese crown prince family when they visited Tsukuba. He then paired with the princess Michiko (the present empress).

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James H. Parker, Jr. Passed Away at 87

 

June 6, 2014 (PO29).  James (Jim) H. Parker, Jr., was born in Bakersfield, California, USA, on December 4, 1926 and passed away on April 15, 2014.  He received a B.S. and Ph.D. in Physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1949 and 1954 respectively.  He was a member of staff at the Westinghouse Research Labs (later R&D Center) in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, from 1953 until retirement in 1985.  Up to 1970, he carried out experimental and theoretical work over a broad range of physics problems ranging from the motion of electrons in gases, color centers in alkali halides, Raman scattering from metals and semiconductors and nonlinear properties of crystals using optical techniques. In particular, Jim was a pioneer in the use of the recently developed laser for Raman spectroscopy, first with He-neon lasers and later with argon ion 

         

     

 

lasers.  He was the first to use this technique for the study of lattice vibrational modes in semiconductors and metals, including localized vibrational modes in Si-Ge alloys.  Because commercial ion lasers were not available at the time (1960s), he became expert in developing technologies of new fabrication techniques for such lasers.  In that decade became one of six directors of the R&D center, each responsible for a broader area of research and development.

 

In 1970, Jim was given special assignment to manage the Cryogenics and Superconductivity Department. This group worked on superconducting materials, theory and experimental work on ac losses of Superconductors and large-scale applications of superconductivity.  The emphasis was on the development of ac generators with low-temperature superconducting field winding for military and power systems applications.  This was a worldwide pioneering work, cooperative with the Westighouse Electro-Mechanical Division (EMD), which also provided a staff of engineers for the design, development and testing of the electrical machinery   This combined effort was crowned with the first successful demonstration of a 60 Hz 5MW alternator for electric utilities and a high-speed, four-pole 5 MV, 400 Hz Generator for the US Air Force.

 

See RN26 for details on these and other achievements of Jim’s Department, which was then among the world leaders in industrial research into superconductivity, fundamental and applied.  four of us (RB, AB, GW and MW) had the privilege to have Jim as our supervisor during good parts of our Westinghouse careers and we remember him most fondly as a kind, insightful, helpful and friendly boss.  Two of us (DF and JM) collaborated with him and have equally fond memories.

 

After retirement from Westinghouse in 1985, Jim continued his engineering work as a private contractor for Westinghouse and several other local companies. Here his work ranged from developing simulation programs for linear motors and rail guns, the electrical design of high speed alternators with high temperature superconducting windings, calculation of Hall current losses for composite Al conductors at 20 K and calculation of the end turn forces in SSC dipole magnets. Such work he continued almost until his death.  Jim has authored or co authored about 50 journal and conference papers.  He was Fellow of the American Physical Society and Life Member of IEEE. 

 

In his private life, Jim was a music lover.  He played bassoon for the Pittsburgh Savoyards and was also a long-standing member of the Pittsburgh Woodwind Quintet. He loved jazz and classical music, physics, electronics, woodworking, and metal working.  In 2009 he lost his beloved wife Cathy, and this was for him an especially hard event.  They were both staunch supporters of local charities, including, for example, the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank. They left behind two children, Lynn and David, and two grandchildren.

 

Richard Blaugher, Alex Braginski, Don Feldman, John Mole, David Parker, George Wagner and Michael Walker.

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Øystein Håkon Fischer Remembered

 

June 1, 2014 (PO28). Prof. Øystein Fischer, Honorary Professor at the University of Geneva, initiator and founding Director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research MaNEP - Materials with novel electronic properties - dedicated to exploring electronic materials of the future, passed away on 19 September 2013 at the age of 71. 

 

Øystein Fischer was born on March 9, 1942 in Bergen, Norway, where he went to school and grew up. His interest for science became obvious very early on, when he set up a small chemistry laboratory under the stairwell in his parents’ house to mix various smelly and exploding cocktails. His scientific career started as a technical assistant at the research laboratory of Nera A/S in Bergen, Norway. In 1962, he moved to Switzerland to study physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. There, he obtained a Diploma degree in theoretical physics in 1967, under the guidance of Prof. W. Baltensberger. He subsequently moved to the University of Geneva to join the group of Prof. M. Peter where he obtained, in 1971, his PhD degree in experimental physics. The same year he became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Geneva. He was promoted to full professorship in the same department in 1977. With characteristic humor, and with ardent commitment to innovation, he then became one of the “galopins” (scamps) in the department, a group of young professors with novel and bright ideas formed as a counter-weight to long established colleagues in the department. 

 

Øystein Fischer dedicated much of his career to studying superconductors, in an effort to understand their fundamental properties, and to develop new materials for applications. In 1975, he synthesized the first superconducting compounds (Chevrel phases) containing a regular lattice of magnetic ions (Europium) - a discovery which launched a decade of international research concerning the interaction between magnetism and superconductivity. This research culminated in 1984 with his discovery of magnetic field induced superconductivity in these same materials. This result was the first confirmed experimental evidence of the Jaccarino-Peter effect predicted in the sixties. 

 

His scientific work took a sharp turn with the discovery of high temperature superconductivity (HTS) in the cuprates in 1986. He was on a one year visit as a Theodore H. Geballe professor at Stanford University when Bednorz and Müller made their groundbreaking discovery. Realizing its importance, Øystein travelled tirelessly between Stanford and Geneva to steer the research of his team from Chevrel phases to HTS. Airplanes became his second home. He initiated a sustained effort growing the first artificial superlattices of HTS cuprates which contributed to the now rapidly developing fields of oxide thin film heterostructures and oxide interface physics. 

 

In 1986, Øystein Fischer introduced scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and scanning tunnelling spectroscopy (STS) to Geneva. The last two decades of his research mainly focused on applying this technique to studying HTS materials. He and his team succeeded in obtaining the first reproducible tunnelling spectroscopy measurements in HTS. This enabled them to observe the vortex cores and pseudo-gap in cuprate high-critical-temperature superconductors, highlighting the unexpected differences between these novel systems and classic superconductors. In 2012, Øystein Fischer was awarded the prestigious Kamerlingh Onnes prize for “leadership in magnetic superconductors and pioneering scanning tunnelling microscopy studies in cuprate high-Tc materials.”

 

We both met Øystein Fischer as a teacher and fantastic mentor. Today, we mourn the loss of a valued colleague and a very dear friend. He was a relentless and contagious enthusiast. Spending an hour in his office after frustrating times in the laboratory struggling with difficult experiments was the best medicine. He was a nearly inexhaustible source of ideas, and had the art of making the most unlikely of all experiments look obvious. He was certainly the expert in motivating his team for scientific projects, conference organization or big plans for new developments in Geneva.

 

His engagement in the community has been truly remarkable. Between 1983 and 1989, he was Vice President of the physics section in Geneva and later President of the section for 3 years. Between 1998 and 2004, he was the Vice-dean of the Faculty of science. He has also been a member of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation for many years. In addition to his remarkable activities in research, Øystein's relentless commitment to physics in Geneva, and condensed matter physics in Switzerland and internationally was known to all. His drive as the director of MaNEP led to a remarkable development of collaborations between scientists in industry and academia. Never short of ideas, he explored different avenues to share his passion for science. He has been the initiator of the PhysiScope - an amazing platform allowing school students of different ages to participate in a selection of scientific adventures - as a way to share enthusiasm for research, and make known to the youngest the fabulous scientific challenges that we face. He teamed up with Swiss artist Etiennne Krähenbühl to create an artwork staging superconducting levitation. Presented alongside a scientific exhibition, this sculpture has proven a unique way to reach a new public normally not attracted to science.

 

Committed to promoting local community development, Prof. Fischer was the initiator of the Geneva Creativity Center, which aims to stimulate exchanges between the academic and industrial sectors, and to find solutions for the most challenging technological issues modern society is facing. He was also head of the project for ‘The Centre of Astronomical, Physical and Mathematical Sciences’ in Geneva, one of the leading projects of the University of Geneva. His vision for the future, and the energy that he was able to put towards causes he championed were clearly exceptional.

 

Øystein Fischer was a very talented and much appreciated teacher. He trained many undergraduates, PhD students and postdocs. He received numerous awards and distinctions for his research, including ‘Doctor honoris causa’ from the University of Rennes in 1990; the Gunnar Randers Research Award in 2005; ‘Doctor honoris causa’ from the University of Neuchâtel also in 2005; and the endowed ‘Tage Erlander’ Chair from the Swedish Council for Research in 2009. He became honorary member of the Swiss Physical Society in 2010.

 

The involvement of Øystein Fischer, the numerous projects he launched, and the ones still to be completed are a fantastic legacy for his younger colleagues in Geneva. We will certainly continue pushing to further develop the initiatives proposed by Øystein Fischer, and to convey as much energy, passion and enthusiasm as he did.

 

Prof. Christoph Renner and Prof. Jean-Marc Triscone

MaNEP-DPMC of the University of Geneva

 

The obituary was provided by our colleagues from the University of Geneva. Two editors of SNF mourn Øystein as an exceptional colleague and friend with an ever-lasting impact in our field who always conveyed enthusiasm.

 

Alex I. Braginski and Herbert C. Freyhardt

Jeffrey A. Stern Passed Away

October 11, 2013 (PO27).  Dr. Jeffrey A. Stern was born on September 16, 1961 and passed away on October 11, 2013, at the age of 52, after a year-long battle with cancer.  

 

Jeff received his B.S. physics degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1983 and his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1991. He spent his entire career at the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. During his tenure at JPL, he made significant contributions to the development of superconducting sensors. He fabricated, tested, and space-qualified superconductor–insulator–superconductor (SIS) mixer chips, an enabling technology for band 5 (1140–1250 GHz) of the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared (HIFI) on the Herschel Space Observatory. HIFI 

      

band 5 included some key spectral lines that have had a major impact on understanding of the interstellar medium (ISM) and astrochemistry. Possibly the most important is the ground state transition of hydrogen floride (HF). A large number of Herschel studies confirm that essentially all flourine in the diffuse ISM is in the form of hydrogen flouride, HF. Consequently this 1232 GHz transition, measured using band 5, can be an accurate tracer of the total column density of clouds. HF has been exploited in studies of the Milky Way and is now being used in observations of external galaxies. Also, Band 5 enabled detection of new species critical for understanding the production of water in the ISM such as H₂O+, and made major contributions to unraveling the ortho-to-para ratio of the water molecule, giving strong indications about the conditions for the formation of water in space.

 

After delivering HIFI band 5 mixers, Jeff pioneered the use of phonon-cooled niobium nitride (NbN) mixers and fabrication of THz waveguide components using lithographic techniques. These technologies enabled new instrument concepts proposed for NASA's sub-orbital programs and follow-on space missions after HIFI. Concurrently with the THz mixer development, Jeff began work on new detectors for optical communications. Jeff was the first person in the US (2004) to make a functional superconducting nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD); the first person to fabricate a functional SNSPD in NbTiN (2006) and the first to fabricate arrays (4 to 16 pixels, 2005-2007). From 2012-2013, Jeff designed and fabricated fiber optic coupled SNSPDs from tungsten silicide (WSi) with the highest efficiency demonstrated to date (93%), 12-pixels arrays used in 2012 to establish an optical communications link with the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft orbiting the moon. His last accomplishment was a 64-pixel free space coupled SNSPD with an active area over 100 times greater than other state-of-the-art devices designed to be mounted on large telescope such as the 5 m Hale telescope at Palomar in California that can be used for optical communication with spacecraft around other planets, for observing ultrafast astrophysical events and for experimentally measuring quantum mechanical effects over large distances.  Jeff Stern's innovations and technology leadership have led to a world-leading team at NASA developing optical detectors for space applications with near perfect efficiency, near zero noise, and high (sub-nanosecond) photon arrival timing resolution.

 

Outside of his profession, Jeff Stern was an avid participant in outdoor activities, including skiing, hiking, camping, rock climbing, swimming, scuba diving.  He loved to cook and was a self-professed "foodie" who delighted in locating and trying new restaurants.  He was also an avid gamer right up until the time he passed.  Jeff was devoted to his family and is survived by Allison, his wife of 23 years, and his son Noah (19) and daughter Maddy (16).

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Leo K. Kovalev, 1941 - 2014, Remembered

February 7, 2014 (PO26). On January 28, 2014, Prof. Leo K. Kovalev suddenly passed away in Moscow from a myocardial infarction at the age of 72. To the superconducting electro-machinery community, Leo K. Kovalev was well known worldwide through his work on electric machines with HTS bulk elements, comprising hysteresis motors, reluctance motors and motors utilizing permanent magnets. He also paid great attention to HTS-magnetic-suspension systems for high-speed rail-borne transportation and flywheels.

 

In 1964, he started his professional career at the Central Institute of Aircraft Engines, Moscow, after graduating from Moscow State Technical University Named After N. E. Bauman.

Leo K. Kovalev (photo of December 2012)

A few years later he joined the Department of Electric Machines, the Dept. 310, of the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI), headed by Prof. Albert I. Bertinov. During that time he pursued research in the field of MHD (magneto-hydrodynamic) energy conversion, and in 1972 he finished his Science Candidate (doctoral) dissertation on MHD generators. For the following ten years his research activity shifted to ionosphere radio physics, hydrodynamics and radio waves propagation at the Scientific Research Institute of Long-Haul Radio. During 1980-1982 he was the Deputy General Constructor of that institute. In 1982 he returned to the Dept.310 of MAI, headed at that time by Prof. Dmitry A. But, and continued research on MHD problems and in parallel extended his interest to low-temperature superconducting electric machines. When In 1986, when high-temperature superconductivity (HTS) was discovered, Leo concentrated his research on HTS electric machines and developed several series of cryogenic electric machines utilizing bulk HTS elements, operating at liquid nitrogen temperatures. He is the author of four books and more than 200 scientific and technical papers. In 1996 he attained his D.Sc. (habilitation equivalent) degree and became a Professor. Since 2002 he headed Dept. 310 of MAI, and in that same year he was awarded the State Prize of Russian Government in the field of Science and Technology. He initiated “The Centre of Superconducting Electric Machines and Devices” at MAI. Leo was an enthusiastic specialist in electromechanics, applied superconductivity, hydrodynamics and radio physics. He liked to first identify new scientific problems and then to solve them.

 

He actively took part in the international development of superconducting electric machines and was one of the initiators of the German-Russian cooperation, leading to the design and development of superconducting electric motors with liquid nitrogen cooling. The consortium comprised: Oswald Elektromotoren GmbH (Miltenberg), Stuttgart Technical University, IPHT (Jena), IFW (Dresden), Moscow Aviation Institute, A.A. Bochvar All-Russian Scientific Research Institute for Inorganic Materials (Moscow), All-Russian Electrotechnical Institute (Moscow), and the Institute for Solid State Physics (Chernogolovka, Moscow region).

 

Prof. Leo K. Kovalev was an Academician of the Russian Academy of Electrotechnical Sciences, an Honored Scientist of Russian Federation (RF), and an advisory council member of Highest Certifying Commission (RF).

 

Besides his research activities, Leo K. Kovalev was a true intellectual and a real friend for all his partners. Everyone who visited his Moscow home or countryside residence was surrounded with hospitality and warmth. He possessed a rare gift of charming his interlocutor from the very first words of communication.  He left behind his dear wife Tatiana and a son, who like all of us will miss him very much.
 

Vladimir T. Penkin and Konstantin L. Kovalev

Nikolai Kopnin, Low-temperature Physicist

January 2, 2014 (PO25). Our friend and colleague Professor Nikolai Borisovich Kopnin passed away on October 20, 2013, during a lecturing trip to Rome. He was 67 years old.

 

Nikolai Kopnin had been a frequent visitor at the Aalto Low Temperature Laboratory¹ for several years until in 2000 he became a member of the staff.  His early collaboration with the Laboratory was on the dynamics of quantized vortices in helium-3 superfluids.  Lately, his studies contributed extensively to the development of superconducting nanoelectronics, the new backbone of the Laboratory's research.

 

Nikolai received his physics education in Moscow. In 1973 he 

Nikolai B. Kopnin (Photo taken October 16, 2013 in Rome)

defended his PhD thesis on vortices in Type II superconductors under the supervision of Academician Lev P. Gor’kov in the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics. He remained a researcher of the Landau Institute, and in 1984 he received his higher doctoral degree.  In 2011, he was awarded the International Francis Simon Prize (together with his Landau colleague, S.V. Iordanskii).  The Prize was for his work on forces acting on quantum vortices in superfluids and superconductors. One of these forces is now known as the "Kopnin force".

 

The main area of Nikolai Kopnin's research was superconductivity, primarily its non-equilibrium and non-stationary phenomena. His research work has been highly recognized and he was one of the leading experts in this field world-wide, as shown by the citations of his monograph “Nonequilibrium superconductivity" (Oxford University Press, 2001).  He has contributed to the studies of anisotropic and layered superconductors, developed the microscopic theories for dissipative and non-stationary flow in Fermi superfluids, in particular in superfluid 3He, worked on new mechanisms for the formation of topological defects during rapid quench-cooled phase transitions, which has applications in cosmology, and he constructed theories of superfluid quantum turbulence.  During more recent years he investigated the physics of mesoscopic structures and devices, including graphene.  He published more than 150 highly cited articles in leading international journals.

 

Already in 1991, by extending his theory of the "Kopnin force" to chiral superfluids Nikolai predicted the existence of fermionic bound states, which have exactly zero energy. Today these quasiparticles are known as Majorana fermions - objects, which are still elusive in particle physics, but may be observable in topological superfluids and superconductors.  The bound states in chiral superfluids found by him have in addition the remarkable property that their spectrum is dispersionless.  Now such flat bands are intensively searched for in solid-state materials.  According to Nikolai’s recent work, the singular density of states in materials with a flat band may open the route to superconductivity at room temperature.

 

Nikolai Kopnin was a modest person who was always fair and considerate to his colleagues and friends, and they considered him a noble man with a strong passion for science.  He was a person whom one could always trust and who dedicated and committed himself fully to his research activity.  His free time Nikolai devoted to his family, and enjoyed interesting hikes and journeys to wilderness. Those who were fortunate to be friends with Nikolai know that there is nothing better to look for. 

 

Nikolai was always caring and loyal, with warm human spirits and intelligent sense of humour.

 

Matti Krusius, Jukka Pekola and Grigori Volovik

Kiyoshi Tsukasa, 1959-2013

December 13, 2013 (PO24).  Dr. Kiyoshi Tsukasa, the Group Leader of Magnet Development Group and the Office Chief of Planning and Coordination at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan, passed away on January 25, 2013, at the age of 53. He left behind his wife and son.

 

Kiyoshi was born in Hiroshima, Japan. He received his B.S. in 1983, M.S. in 1985, and Ph.D. in nuclear engineering in 1988 all from the University of Tokyo. In 1988 he joined the National Research Institute for Metals (now NIMS) and started research activity in high-field magnet technologies. His first research achievement was the development of 20 T large bore superconducting magnet (1992) that was cooled with saturated superfluid helium.

Kiyoshi Tsukasa (photo of March 2008)

 

He was also in charge of the hybrid magnets at Tsukuba Magnet Laboratory (TML) and succeeded in achieving a series of world records for the highest steady magnetic field; 36.5 T in 1995 and 37.3 T in 1999. He was promoted to Group Leader of TML in 2001 and Director of TML in 2006. His research areas had covered both the superconducting materials (metallic and oxide) and superconducting magnets. His group attained the highest magnetic field of any superconducting magnet by successful generation of 24.0 T using HTS/LTS magnet (2011).

 

Since the late 1990s, he devoted his efforts to the high-field superconducting NMR magnets. Successful fabrication and operation of a series of high-field NMR magnets: 920 MHz (2001), 930 MHz (2004) and 1.03 GHz (under development) will be always remembered as pioneer work. In addition to achievements in the generation of highest magnetic fields, other Kyoshi’s research achievements included the development of high magnetic-field gradient magnet to form protein crystals in quasi-microgravity environment (2004) and the development of a magnetic flux concentrator using bulk superconductor as a magnetic lens (2009).

He served Applied Superconductivity and Magnet Technology communities as a member of program committees of Applied Superconductivity Conference (ASC) and International Conference of Magnet Technology (MT), was a member of Management Committee of the International Superconductivity Symposium ISS), a member of Iseult/Inumac Magnet Advisory Committee, and a vice-chairman of nomination committee of Cryogenics and Superconductivity Society of Japan for best presentations.

Vladimir Pan Remembered

November 6, 2013 (PO23).  On 20 September 2013, Prof. Vladimir M. Pan passed away at 82. Vladimir was an Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Metal Physics (IMP) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev. Over four decades he successfully led the Department of Superconductivity, which he founded in 1970 at the Institute of Metal Physics in Kiev (USSR, now Ukraine).

 

Born on 15 September 1931 in Kharkov, USSR, Vladimir earned his first degree (Master of Science) at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute in 1955. In the same year, he joined the Institute of Metal Physics, where he defended his PhD in 1961, working on phase diagrams of metals. This experience had allowed him later to merge the fields of Materials Science and Superconductivity, and to establish a new research direction in Ukraine, the Science of Superconducting Materials.

 

Having published over 400 research papers and reports, Vladimir actively continued to work and energize his colleagues and students till the very last days of his prominent life. The worldwide recognition of his work in superconductivity followed his pioneering high-pressure synthesis of Nb₃Si superconductor in 1978, as well as the design of Nb-based superconducting cables for high current applications. With great enthusiasm, he embarked on exploring Materials Science and Physics of High Temperature Superconductivity (HTS) from the first days of its discovery in 1986, making highly cited contributions to understanding of vortex pinning and structural properties of YBa₂Cu₃O₇ thin films.

 

During his long scientific career, Vladimir has earned a lot of friends around the World, visiting different universities, research organisations and industries in Europe, United States, Japan and Australia. He was Visiting Professor at University of Goettingen and University of Leipzig (Germany), University of Wollongong (Australia), Ben-Gurion University (Israel), and many others.

His positive attitude towards life, inexhaustible enthusiasm and energy in every deed he initiated, endless optimism and sense of humour attracted a lot of young people into the field of science, including his own two sons.
 

Alexander Kordyuk for IMP and Alexey Pan

Alex Shikov Unexpectedly Passed Away

October 30, 2013 (PO22).  Professor Alex Shikov unexpectedly passed away on October 26, 2013.  Alexander Konstantinovich Shikov was born in Norilsk (then USSR) in 1948.  He graduated from the Moscow Steel and Alloys Institute in 1971 and started his scientific career as a junior research associate at the Bochvar Institute of Inorganic Materials, also in 1971. He received his D.Sc. (habilitation) degree in 1991.  Since 1998, Dr. Shikov served as the deputy director of Bochvar Institute, and from March to August 2009 as its Head.  He was then appointed as the Executive Director of Kurchatov Institute's center for Nano-Bio-Info-Cognitive (NBIC) Science and Technology.  Memorial ceremonies were held on October 30, 2013 in Kurchatov Culture Center.

Alexander Shikov (recent photo)

 

Shikov made an outstanding contribution to restoration of production of superconducting materials after the collapse of Soviet Union.  Due to his scientific and management talents Russian conductors for ITER are today competitive or even exceed the highest performance requirements. While at Kurchatov Institute, he directed research into superconducting materials for ITER and initiated production of HTS materials.  Prof. Shikov was an author of three monographs, 250 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and 60 patents. He held a Chair of the Applied Superconductivity division in the Moscow Institute of Engineering Physics (Moscow’s outstanding Technical University).

 

Prof. Shikov was awarded several State Prizes in the field of science and engineering, an award of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the gold and silver medals of the International Exhibition of Inventions. He was a member of the Academy of Electro-technical Sciences of the Russian Federation.  He also received an International Cryogenic Materials Conference Best Paper Award at the meeting in Tucson, Arizona in July 2009.

 

The memory about this outstanding man will be carried not only by his conductors with non-decaying currents and will last.  All who knew him will remember his energy, motivation, optimism and achievements.
 

(Obituary based in part on that published in the Russian website “Superconductors in Power Industry”; see Superconductors in Power Industry, in Russian. Readers in Russian can find there some additional reading on and by Shikov.)

John Clem Passed Away

August 7, 2013 (PO21).  Professor John R. Clem passed away on August 2, 2013 after a four year battle with mesothelioma. 

 

John was born in 1938 in Waukegan, Illinois; his parents were trained as teachers.  John received scholarships at the University of Illinois, where he obtained his undergraduate degree in engineering physics. John then earned his Ph.D. in superconductivity under John Bardeen.  After postdoctoral appointments in Maryland and München/Germany, John joined the Iowa State University Physics Department and Ames Laboratory in 1967, and enjoyed 46 years of collaboration with ISU and Ames Lab colleagues.  For the community of people dealing with a broad field of type-II superconductivity, John's name is and will always be associated with such hits as "pancake vortices", the term coined by John soon after the 

John R. Clem (photo of past decade)

discovery of layered high-T_c cuprate superconductors.  John established and edited the tremendously successful and useful “High-T_c Update” from 1987 to 2000, well remembered by all participants in the high-T_c boom.  Among many other contributions to superconducting phenomenology, John’s papers on ac losses , edge pinning, flux-cutting, and recently on critical currents in superconducting thin-film strips of various shapes – a hot topic in superconducting electronics – will be remember and cited in years to come.    

 

John was also an avid vocalist, who enjoyed singing baritone on many occasions, conference banquets included.     John is survived by his wife Judy Clem, his sister Caryl Clem, children Paul Clem and Jean (Clem) Latzke, and three grandchildren.  

 

By Vladimir Kogan, Ruslan Prozorov, and Doug Finnemore, Iowa State University and Ames Lab

Two Editors of SNF mourn John as a good friend and source of inspiration.  One of us (AIB) benefitted greatly from his advice and less-known theoretical work not mentioned in the obituary.

Alex I. Braginski and Herbert C. Freyhardt

Sergey Egorov Lost his Battle with Cancer

July 22, 2013 (PO20).  Sergey Egorov passed away on March 24, 2013, after a one-year long battle with cancer.  He was born on March 1, 1948 in Leningrad, USSR, which remained his hometown until end. Studies at the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute (now Saint-Petersburg State Polytechnical University) provided an excellent basis for the future carrier and scientific growth of Sergey as one of the leaders of the applied superconductivity in Russia.  At the same time the streets of Leningrad remember the rustling of tires when the cyclist Egorov rushed to victories in student bicycle races.  This hobby developed the qualities of a fighter, which armed Sergey for all future projects.

 

Sergei Egorov graduated as electrophysics engineer, and his all carrier was linked with the D.V. Efremov Institute of 

Sergey Egorov, 2005 or 2006

Electrophysical Apparatus (NIIEFA). His start there in 1972 coincided with the beginning of the development of applied superconductivity at the Efremov Institute. His early activity contributed to the positive outcome of the design and manufacture of the combined solenoid КС-250 (1975) with the record 25 T magnetic field, the 1.2 m in diameter solenoid “Giperon” (1978, with the magnetic field of 6 T and stored energy of 24 MJ) and other superconducting devices.

 

Sergey received his PhD in 1984 and the degree of Doctor of Science in 2006, both from the Efremov Institute. Last thirty years his professional activity was focused on supporting analysis and R&D of different superconducting magnet systems, mostly for superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) and tokamak reactors.  As a project leader or an expert Sergey Egorov took parts in many international projects including tasks for MIT (USA), BWXT (USA), Jefferson Lab (USA), GHMFL (France), Ansaldo (Italia), DESY (Germany) etc. Sergey was a participant of L-star detector  (SSC, USA, 1991), INTOR and ITER projects. In the frame of the ITER activity he was well known as an expert on AC-loss and stability analysis of superconductors.  The valuable achievements of his activity included:

Egorov headed the Superconducting Magnet Systems Department of the Efremov Institute for many years. Thanks to him the laboratories of that Department provide a wide range of possibilities for scientific and engineering studies in the field of the low- and high-temperature superconductivity (LTS and HTS).  The PF-1 coil of the ITER poloidal system, the LTs solenoid and dipoles for different application, various LTS and HTS SMESs, HT superconducting current limiters, high-voltage insulating units for the cryogenic application, related stability, mechanical and thermal computation techniques are the incomplete list of the department activities which started and progressed under Sergey’s control and supervision. 

 

He was a very creative man. His colleagues appreciated his experience, deep and broad knowledge as well as friendship and sense for humor.  He loved life… All his friends remember the parties where poetry was recited and songs sung or collective gathering of edible mushrooms in the woods, with a lot of fun and chatting. All that gave Sergey necessary relaxation and energy to start new and new projects.

 

Sergey Egorov was author or co-author of about 100 publications.  In his last years he successfully combined research activity with teaching load.  He was appointed Professor of Saint Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation and read several training courses on nanotechnology and technical superconductivity. A lot of students owe him the necessary basis to start their carriers of scientist or engineer.

 

Since 1997 Sergey was a member of the Board of International Advisory Editors of Cryogenics. His professional reviewing helped many authors to publish important scientific and engineering results.

 

Sergey left behind a wife who supported him in the fight with the awful disease, and friends who will remember him and strive to finish projects that were Sergey’s lifeworks.  Let his memory be eternal…
 

Igor Rodin & colleagues, NIIEFA

Klaus Irgmaier Met His Death in a Tragic Accident

July 19, 2013 (PO19).  On June 28, 2013 we lost our colleague and friend Klaus Irgmaier in a tragic accident at his home.

 

Klaus was born on December 23, 1966 in Munich. After graduating from school he studied physics at the Technical University of Munich where he graduated in 1996. During his PhD thesis he designed and established test rigs for measuring the microwave surface impedance of HTS films with spatial resolution and characterizing the high frequency properties of HTS coatings as a function of composition.

 

In 2000 he joined THEVA and was responsible for the quality assessment of films and later for the entire infrastructure of the company, including IT, safety, and the production plant.

 

Klaus Irgmaier (recent)

 

 

He was a consummate mechanical engineer who made innovative contributions to both education and research. In 1967, he introduced an innovative approach to undergraduate education in thermodynamics that prevails to this day. In graduate thermodynamics, he brought the thermodynamics subject into the 21^st century.

In collaboration with Ernest Cravalho, he developed the textbook Engineering Thermodynamics. Joe was famous for his hands-on approach to engineering. He viewed the world as a problem in engineering design — so much so that when asked why any given natural phenomenon took the form found in nature, his standard reply was, “Because that’s the way I would build it.”

Smith’s research spanned fundamental areas of thermodynamics, heat transfer, electromagnetics and cryogenics, and he was able to integrate these diverse fields to advance the practice of engineering. His success in this process was perhaps best manifested in his work with Gerald Wilson, on the development of the superconducting generator.  Stimulated by the first exploratory study by Woodson, Stekly et al., Smith and Wilson successfully demonstrated in 1968 a small vertical shaft alternator with a superconducting field winding and room-temperature armature.  The publication of this milestone work lead to multiple industrial efforts, which continue successfully until today, now with high-T_c windings.  In recognition of Joe’s many contributions to the practice of mechanical engineering, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering.  Among his other awards he was also the Franklin Institute laureate in Engineering (1987).

He served as a technical consultant to various corporations as well as start-up ventures. He also held many patents. After retirement in 2008 he continued to contribute his time to MIT and its cryogenic lab.  In addition to being an accomplished academic, he was also a skilled mechanic and carpenter. He will be remembered for always eagerly volunteering his knowledge and expertise.  At a recent symposium in his honor at MIT, many former students spoke of his influence on their careers.
 

Note: Cold Facts, the Newsletter of the Cryogenic Society of America (CSA) features tributes to Dr. Smith in their Summer 2013 issue.  Please click here to read these tributes.

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Gordon Donaldson

(PO17U). Gordon Bryce Donaldson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on August 10, 1941 and died in Glasgow on November 28, 2012 at the age of 71. 

 

Gordon was an undergraduate student at Christ's College, Cambridge from 1959 to 1962, when he received his BA. He and Christine were married in 1962, shortly after his graduation. Subsequently, he was a research student at the Royal Society Mond Laboratory, Cambridge from 1962 to 1965, when he received his Ph.D.

 Under the supervision of John Adkins, Gordon measured the energy gap in Zn-ZnO-Zn tunnel junctions and investigated the subgap quasiparticle resistance of Al-AlOx-Ag tunnel junctions as an ultralow temperature thermometer. Immediately after receiving his Ph.D., Gordon became a Lecturer in the Physics Department at the newly created Lancaster University. He spent 1974 1975 on sabbatical leave at the University of California, Berkeley where, together with Mark Ketchen, Wolf Goubau and John Clarke, he developed the first thin-film, planar gradiometer based on a dc SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device).

 

In 1975, Gordon retuned to Scotland as a Lecturer in the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. In 1985 he became Professor of Applied Physics, a position he occupied until his retirement in 2006. On his arrival in Glasgow Gordon quickly established a new research group to make SQUIDs for useful applications. From modest beginnings with two staff and one tiny laboratory, the group grew steadily until, at its peak, it had approaching thirty members, plus a host of collaborators worldwide.

 

He and colleagues at Glasgow University and the city's Southern General Hospital secured substantial funding from the Wellcome Trust to set up a new biomagnetism facility in 1988 on the hospital campus, using SQUID gradiometers made at Strathclyde for measurements on patients and volunteers. Studies over ten years included fetal, stereopsis and spinal and peripheral nerve measurements.

 

Another of his main research interests was the use of SQUIDs for non-destructive evaluation (NDE), targeted at defects in aluminum and carbon-fiber aircraft components. This started long before the discovery of high temperature superconductors (HTS), initially with wire-wound gradiometers and niobium SQUIDs, but soon progressed to miniature thin-film niobium integrated SQUID gradiometers, made in the dedicated facility at Strathclyde. This was followed by major programs to develop and demonstrate HTS gradiometers for NDE, supported by a pulsed laser deposition system developed in the Group to grow HTS films and bi-crystal junctions.

 

Notable advances included the development of semi-portable NDE systems for use on curved surfaces and the application of neural nets to the interpretation of defects in carbon fiber composites. Gordon was very active within the superconducting community. He organized the International Superconductivity Conference (ISEC) at the University of Strathclyde in 1991. He was Coordinator for the UK Committee on High-Transition Temperature Superconductivity.

 

In 1991 he founded the Cambridge Winter School in Superconductivity to train junior researchers from the UK and overseas. He was Chair of the Low Temperature Group of the Institute of Physics, London. He spent productive sabbatical leaves at the University of Virginia in 1982 and at CSIRO in Sydney in 1999. His many achievements were recognized by his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1991.

 

Gordon is survived by his wife, Christine, by his children, Ian and Anne, and by two grandchildren.

 

We are grateful to Ian and Anne Donaldson for their help in preparing this remembrance.

Loss of Dr. William (Rob) McGrath in Fatal Car Accident

August 14, 2012 (PO16).  MCGRATH, Dr. William (Rob)(56), died August 8^th in a car accident. Born in Oklahoma City to William R. McGrath and Royetta Robinson. Rob graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in Physics and attended University of California, Berkeley obtaining a Ph.D in Physics. 

 

He was a Project Manager/Senior Research Scientist/Principal Physicist at JPL Pasadena supervising the Submillimeter-Wave Superconductive Sensors Group. Awards include: Lew Allen Award for Excellence from JPL, three other Recognition Awards from JPL, sixteen NASA Achievement Awards including two NASA Space Act Awards, and NASA Recognition Award for Analysis of "High-Tc Hot Electron Superconductive Mixer for Terahertz Applications". He held six patents, over 180 publications and participated in the following professional organizations: IEEE, APS, Sigma Xi, and MIT Club of SoCal. He enjoyed scuba diving, biking, snow skiing, astronomy and wood-working. He is survived by his loving wife Lisa, of twenty-five years, daughter Kelly, sisters Kathy Prichard of Royse City, TX, and Royan McCleskey of Southlake, TX and extended family members. 

 

Jens Müller Is Victim of Tragic Accident

August 10, 2012 (PO15).  On July 24, 2012 we lost our colleague and friend Jens Müller in a tragic accident.  He drowned in the waters of Atlantic Ocean while saving the life of his son.

In the superconductor community, Jens was well-known as CEO of the German companies Trithor and Zenergy Power, which marked just two stations in his professional life fully dedicated to superconductor technology.

 

Jens was born on December 11, 1979, and as a lucky coincidence, graduated from high school just in the aftermath of the discovery of high-temperature superconductors (HTS). He immediately became attracted to this field, and the long-range perspective of solving fundamental issues in electric power technology by implementation of HTS. 

 

He thus studied physics at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Bonn, graduated with honors, and then, with a Siemens scholarship, received his PhD on compound materials for superconducting wires and cables.He started his professional career working as an analyst for Deutsche Bank evaluating projects and portfolio companies for IPOs.  Eventually, he profited from the know-how in financing when founding the start-up company Trithor.  It was the time when the first wave of superconductivity hype already subsided and many big companies were withdrawing from the field. Jens recognized that a dedicated superconductor company would be necessary to keep things moving on. With the double strategy to produce superconducting wire as well as HTS components and devices, Trithor teamed up with the machine maker Bültmann to develop the first HTS-based induction heater of billets. After the insolvency of Trithor he managed to attract new investors to continue this development under the label Zenergy Power. From 2006 on, Jens led and expanded the Zenergy group with new subsidiaries in the US and Australia.

 

The first commercial breakthrough came in 2008 when the billet heater was successfully commissioned as the world’s first industrial scale HTS installation in a German aluminum extrusion plant.  The convincing concept and large energy savings of this product were immediately recognized and awarded a number of prestigious prizes – among them the Hermes Award (2008, see HE15), German Environmental Award (2009), the Innovation Award for Climate and Environment (2009), and the European Business Award for the Environment (2010).

 

At the same time, Jens initiated within the Zenergy group the development of large HTS generators and fault current limiters for electric power supply. The first hydro-generator has been successfully tested and will be soon installed in a German hydro-power plant.  Another premiere was the first live-grid HTS fault current limiter installation that protected Southern California in 2010 from a power outage due to a sudden current surge. Jens also pushed the development of lower- cost HTS coated conductors. Zenergy started developing a 2G manufacturing process based on ink-jet printing and an all-chemical solution approach.

 

In 2011, the board of directors decided to abandon the superconductivity activities at Zenergy. Jens was released from his position at the Zenergy Power group and could not prevent the insolvency of the German Zenergy Power branch. To continue the work on HTS components, he founded,  together with former fellow partners, the engineering consulting company ECO5 with focus on the development of HTS wind power generators.

 

Jens Müller was a visionary – always one step ahead, and a tireless promoter of the HTS cause. He initiated significant developments and increased public awareness of superconductor technology. His inventions are documented in numerous patents.

 

Jens was a friendly and cheerful person, who gave hold, strength, and confidence to his colleagues and fellow men. His successes were due to expertise, tireless efforts deep commitment, and the unique skill to convince and to inspire others with his ideas.

 

Jens lost his life at the age of only 42. With him we have lost a protagonist of superconductor technology, an excellent businessman, partner, and friend. He has left marks, and the gap caused by his death will be hard to close. Our grief and deep compassion is with his wife and three kids. 

 

By Werner Prusseit  (ivSupra) and Ursula Kollenbach (formerly Zenergy Power)

Ray Sarwinski Passed Away in March 2011

 

August 8, 2012 (PO14).  Raymond Edmund (Ray) Sarwinski was born Jan 11, 1936. He was raised in Peru, Illinois, where he attended the St. Beade Academy (a Catholic high school), of which he was later a benefactor, and the LaSalle College. His academic education included a B.S. in Physics, an M.S. in Physics/Mathematics and Ph.D. in Engineering Physics, all from the University of Illinois. His Ph.D. dissertation was on a NMR method of spin-echo to measure diffusion coefficients. His advisor was John Wheatley who later moved to the University of California at San Diego and also founded S.H.E. Corporation, the first ever SQUID and ultra-low temperature cryogenics (dilution refrigerator) company.

Ray Sarwinski (photo from 1990s)

 

Ray's first employer was the Ohio State University, where he was a Research Associate (1966-1967) and assistant Professor (1967-1972). During the summer of 1970, Wheatley asked Ray to become SHE's first president, but he declined, wanting to keep his faculty position. However, in 1972 he moved to San Diego, CA to join SHE as its Senior Physicist, becoming SHE's Manager of R&D. Ray's work with Georgio Frossati at the Centre de Recherches sur les Très Basses Températures in Grenoble, France led to the development of SHE's 400 and 500 series of dilution refrigerators that achieved temperatures as low as 2.9 mK.
 
In 1982, Ray became an independent consultant at an impressive number of institutions and companies, including Quantum Design, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, BioMagnetic Technologies, Aerojet General, Physical Dynamics, GWR Instruments, General Atomics, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, R. G. Hansen & Associates, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Hughes Aircraft, Maxwell Laboratories, CryoFab Australia, CeramPhysics, Applied Superconetics, Imotron, the University of California at San Francisco's Physics Research Laboratory, Ball Aerospace, Advanced CryoMagnetics, Tristan Technologies, Conductus, Toshiba America Magnetic Imaging, Cryogen, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Alpha Magnetics, International Cryogenics, Primex Physics, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Aerie Partners among others.  Ray founded his own company, the Cryogenic Designs, Inc., of San Diego, of which he was the President and CEO. One of its products was coil-foil which is used in many high performance non-magnetic liquid helium dewars for biomagnetic measurements.  It became also Ray’s consulting base.
 
During his career, Ray published over 30 refereed scientific publications in the field of low temperature physics and technology, including papers on low temperature properties of matter, superconductivity, NMR, dewars, SQUID instruments, sensors and cryogenic refrigeration. He was also granted 30 patents for his inventions related to the development of diverse devices such as the stabilized point contact toroidal rf SQUID, vapor-shielded metal and non-metal helium dewars, integration of cryocoolers and storage dewars to prolong hold time (including the first 1000 day hold-time liquid helium dewar), ELF SQUID receivers, towable horizontal dewars, ultra-low temperature dilution refrigerators and the variable temperature superconducting susceptometer. Ray's experience included also the development of custom designed cryogenic systems, scientific programming, level detectors, variable temperature ground based satellite coolers and cascade JT refrigerators. He was also involved in design of MRI magnets for both superconducting and permanent magnet coils, active and passive shielded magnet systems, magnet shim coil design and iron placement to produce homogenous fields.
 
Ray's honors included: 3M Teaching Fellow, Alfred E. Sloan Research Fellow, and Membership on the U.S. National Committee for the International Institute of Refrigeration.
 
Ray was a special person with many interests. The long list included photography, science fiction, astronomy, magic tricks, guns, board games, poker, orchids, esoteric plants, old cars (Lincoln continental, Mustang), dressing up for certain holidays (Halloween or Comic-Con), model planes and model helicopters, motorcycling, flying, collecting old and diverse things such as angel collections, coins, juke boxes, old autos, collection of buttons, and Star Wars. He loved swap meets and would share his special finds with other collectors. He had a certain "old codger reputation". He bought his last motorcycle about 1 year ago before passing away.
 
He had also an interest in computers, however, he continued arguing and fighting with them to make them do what he wanted to do regardless of computer limitations. Eventually, he would call for help. But as soon as he would go back to work on it, the same things would happen again.
 
Ray never had an unkind word to say about anyone. He loved his two sons and his friends. He would do anything to help them and assisted in solving their problems in his own special style. His last months were difficult due to a plethora of health problems. He was prepared for his departure and settled in advance all details of it, including funeral and celebration instructions.  Ray passed away on March 23, 2011.  His ashes were dispersed on the Pacific Ocean from a cryogenic dewar.
 

(The remembrance above is based on information, documents and photos supplied by Mrs. Marilyn Hauck.  Additional input and/or revisions were provided by: William Black, Robert Fagaly, Eugene Hirschkoff, Douglas Paulson and Ronald Sager.)

Carl Henning of LLNL Passed Away

 

August 2, 2012 (PO13). Carl D. Henning, born on Feb, 28, 1939, passed away on June 13, 2012 at the Hospice of the East Bay, California. Carl was a mechanical engineer having received his BS from Ohio University and his PhD from the University of Michigan. He spent most of his career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) where he held many senior management and technical leadership positions in research toward controlling nuclear fusion as an energy source. Carl designed the “baseball” superconducting magnet at LLNL, was responsible for building the world's largest magnet at that time, but also designing massive containment vessels for stemming the oil fires in Kuwait. He spent two years on assignment in Germany as a member of the US contingent 

Carl Henning, photo of 1990s

 of scientists designing the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, ITER.  Much earlier, Carl spent three years at Intermagnetics General Corporation IGC) as VP for Technology Development where he contributed to the development of an MRI machine for General Electric (see RN22).  In 1976-1978 he worked at the Dept. of Energy as Branch Chief in the Office of Magnetic Fusion.  He was Chairman of the ASC in the late 1980s.

 

Carl was the author of many technical papers and presentations, held five U.S. patents, and received numerous honors and awards, including being elected as a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society. In 2011 he was elected to the Fairview High School Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was raised. Carl was an adventurer, rebuilding and flying his own airplanes, and in retirement, sailing a large catamaran which he and his wife, Judy, lived on in the Caribbean for several months of each year.  Among his numerous exploit, in 1988 he flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean in his Cessna 337 which he had rebuilt. Carl, with his infectious laughter, will be remembered by his many friends as a confident, self-sufficient man who relished daunting challenges.

Siegfried Wolff 1939-2012

August 1, 2012 (PO12). Siegfried Wolff, a well known superconducting magnet expert, passed away after a long illness on March 13, 2012, at the age of 73. After his Physics Diploma in 1965 Wolff joined the bubble chamber group at DESY in Hamburg, Germany as a technical physicist. He made substantial contributions to the successful operation of the liquid hydrogen and deuterium bubble chamber and obtained his PhD in 1969 at the University of Hamburg with a thesis on bubble formation and growth in hydrogen and deuterium bubble chambers.

Siegfried Wolff with a dipole magnet,1983

 

In the early 1970s, when the electron-positron storage ring DORIS was constructed, Siegfried Wolff moved over to magnet design and measurement. He designed the compensation coils for a DORIS experiment equipped with a superconducting solenoid, and under his leadership the magnetic measurements for the larger storage ring PETRA were carried out. When the proton-electron collider HERA was proposed, Siegfried Wolff joined the task force which was formed by Bjorn Wiik to design and construct the superconducting accelerator magnets of the proton ring. Wolff spent a sabbatical at Fermilab in 1979/1980 where he worked in the superconducting magnet group and acquired a thorough knowledge of the design principles and construction of the superconducting dipoles and quadrupoles for the Tevatron. Back at DESY he contributed heavily to the design of the HERA dipoles and quadrupoles, and in his group of engineers and technicians a number of protype dipoles were built that performed very well and exceeded the design field of 5 Tesla. In 1984 a radical design change was proposed to increase the field capability of the magnets and improve their quench safety. The warm-iron yoke of the Tevatron-like design was to be replaced by a cold-iron yoke directly surrounding the aluminium-collared coil. Within record time Wolff’s group built a short prototype of the new dipole which reached a field of 6 Tesla without training. The new magnet concept proved extremely successful in the industrially produced HERA magnets and had a strong impact on the design of the LHC magnets. During the construction phase of HERA, Wolff and his group performed the electric and cryogenic installation of the HERA proton ring.

 

When the HERA collider was completed, Wolff became head of the cryogenics group at DESY. He and his group contributed strongly to the successful R&D on superconducting cavities with accelerating fields above 25 MV/m, which was carried out by the international TESLA collaboration. Wolff’s group was also involved in the cryostat construction and provided the cryogenics for the TESLA Test Facility linac which was later upgraded to the free-electron laser FLASH.

 

Siegfried Wolff was a superconducting magnet expert of international reputation. He was a member of various advisory committees, among them the LHC Machine Advisory Committee, and he was co-author of a book on superconducting accelerator magnets. Siegfried Wolff will be remembered by his friends and colleagues for his great technical competence, his fairness and reliability, and his willingness to accept responsibility for demanding projects.

(By friends and colleagues at DESY)

Marty Lubell of ORNL Died in Early 2012

August 1, 2012 (PO11).  Another loss to superconducting community came only now to our attention.

 

Martin S. (Marty) Lubell, age 79, of Oak Ridge, passed away Monday, Jan. 16, 2012, at his home in Oak Ridge.  Marty was born June 5, 1932, in New York City, N.Y., graduated from MIT and got his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley.  He initially worked at the Westinghouse Research Laboratories under Clarence Zener, but in 1959 moved from Pittsburgh, PA to Oak Ridge, TN, and worked as a physicist at ORNL and Y-12 until his retirement.

 

Marty was the Chairman of the 1982 ASC held in Knoxville. Among other his activities, he led the Oak Ridge superconducting magnet group that put together and tested the Large Coil Task (LCT) superconducting tokamak test solenoid of the early 1980s. Each of the “D” coils of that solenoid was constructed by a different commercial company or laboratory in order to get world wide experience in the construction of these devices.  Marty was publishing on the LCF test results, see RN26.

Marty Lubell (in 1990s)

 

Marty was a member of the Jewish Congregation of Oak Ridge, the Knoxville Museum of Art, and the United States Chess Federation; he wrote one of the 100 Greatest Chess Problems and was the Tri-State Chess Champion when he lived in Pittsburgh. He enjoyed refereeing soccer for both the AYSO (American Youth Soccer Association) and competitive leagues, skiing and the arts.

Clyde Taylor of LLNL and LBNL Passed Away

August 1, 2012 (PO10).  Only now we learned that Clyde Taylor passed away November 16, 2011.  We publish this obituary based on the LBNL remembrance released by the LBNL News Center.

 

Clyde Taylor, a pioneer of superconducting magnet technology at both Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LLNL and LBNL), died suddenly on November 16, 2011 at the age of 80.

 

Clyde was born December 5, 1930, in Susanville, CA, and attended Stanford University, where he majored in engineering.  He received his B.S. in 1952 and M.S. in mechanical engineering in 1953.  He then moved to Ventura and became Chief Drilling Engineer for Shell Oil Company’s West Coast Operations.

 

Clyde Taylor (date unknown)

In 1956 Clyde began his work in superconducting magnets at Lawrence Livermore Lab, rising to become assistant director of the Lab’s magnetic confinement fusion program. He was active in Livermore community affairs and served on planning commissions and the city council, before being elected mayor of Livermore.

 

Livermore Lab’s fusion program at the time focused on mirror machines, in which plasma was confined by increasing gradients along magnetic field lines. Such machines required superconducting materials that could remain stable at very low temperatures while carrying very high currents and generating high magnetic fields. Livermore’s Jon Zbasnik recalls that, as part of the effort to build the Fusion Engineering Research Facility, and later the Mirror Fusion Test Facility – for which Clyde developed the “yin-yang” magnet configuration – he initiated research on niobium-tin, which is still at the  leading edge of superconducting magnet technology.

Clyde left Livermore in 1981 to join Berkeley Lab as head of the Supercon Group in the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division (AFRD), often working closely with Shlomo Caspi of Berkeley Lab’s Engineering Division. Clyde became head of the multilab engineering team that won the magnet design competition for the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), whose planning efforts were based at Berkeley Lab. The SSC was canceled in 1993, but Caspi recalls that Clyde’s engineering skills and talent for management had led DOE to recognize AFRD’s strong position and unique analytical skills in the superconducting magnet field.

 

Clyde renewed his interest in niobium-tin as essential for advanced magnets when he led AFRD research toward achieving extraordinarily strong magnetic fields, beyond 10 tesla; he designed the first magnet to use windings of the material, according to Ron Scanlan, who in 1994 traded roles with Clyde and became supervisor of AFRD’s magnet group. The niobium-tin magnet they built achieved 13.6T in 1997, still a record. Today, similar magnets play an important role in AFRD’s designs for the planned Large Hadron Collider upgrade. During those years Clyde also put in place a special cabling machine at AFRD, which served as a prototype for industry and continues to supply cable to several DOE labs today.

 

At this time, as Scanlan recalls, Clyde also developed a solution to a major problem limiting the performance of accelerator magnets: the movement of structural elements under the tremendous forces generated by the magnets themselves, which can lead to disastrous “quenches.” His solution was a system of keys and bladders filled with liquid metal to prestress critical components. Refined by Shlomo Caspi, the bladder and key design made possible a series of record-breaking superconducting magnets built at Berkeley Lab.

 

Beginning in 1995, Clyde developed the “superbend” insertion devices that allowed the Advanced Light Source, built to optimize soft x-ray production, to extend operations well into the hard x-ray region, a requirement for protein-crystallography beamlines that are among the ALS’s most productive, according to AFRD’s Alan Jackson. Developed in cooperation with an industrial firm, Wang NMR, the Superbends are unique to the ALS among the world’s synchrotron light sources, which now has several of them.

 

Also in 1995, Clyde applied the bladder and key concept to his design for the superconducting magnet structure of a new kind of ion source for the 88-Inch Cyclotron, proposed by Claude Lyneis of the LBNL Nuclear Science Division. Called VENUS (”versatile ECR ion source for nuclear science”), the new source would be capable of producing high currents of ions, from hydrogen all the way to uranium, but required the highest magnetic fields ever achieved in this kind of ion source. Lyneis notes that the outstanding performance of VENUS, completed in 2003, was a key factor in enabling the rare ion beam facility now under construction at Michigan State University.

 

Clyde continued to work on both the Superbends and VENUS after his 1996 retirement and subsequent rehire as a consultant, continuing part time at the Lab until 2008. His lifelong enthusiasm for long-distance bicycle trips, backpacking, and cross-country skiing continued, as did his passion for travel abroad and for theater.

 

Clyde is warmly remembered by his many associates over the years as “a true gentleman” (Alan Jackson); “a very sincere, very kind, and very warm person, with great devotion to his work” (Bert Wang); “my mentor, supervisor, and friend for over 25 years, and one of the best people I have known” (Ron Scanlan); “a gentle person, soft-spoken and a great traveling companion [who] liked people and was eager to help, especially young people at the beginning of their career” (Shlomo Caspi); and many others, including Claude Lyneis, who put together the LBNL remembrance.

 

Dahl grew up in Bergen, Norway, from the age of 4 until he was 17.  He then came to the U.S. and served three years in the U.S. Army, including two years stationed on Guam in the Pacific.  Taking after his father, Dahl was interested in science and physics from an early age.  He studied science during his Army years, and after leaving the service he entered the University of Wisconsin, obtaining his Ph.D. in Physics in 1960.  His post-doctoral work was done at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark.

 

Per Dahl joined the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in 1963.  He arrived at a time when superconductors were beginning to move from laboratory development to industrial production. At this time, development of accelerator magnets using NbTi and Nb3Sn began. Per became involved in the design of these magnets early in his BNL career and acquired a good understanding both of the materials and their use in magnets.  He put this knowledge to good use later in his BNL career when he became the principal person writing about magnets and superconductors for technically-oriented audiences.  This work also provided him with an opportunity to display his skills as an artist. His drawing that shows all the critical components of a superconducting cable is still used in talks for visitors to Brookhaven. 

 

Per began working on the larger stage of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in 1987, where he continued work documenting the magnet program.  When the SSC effort moved from the design location, Berkeley, to the laboratory location in Texas, Per expanded his work to include both the documentation of the conventional construction effort and preparation of information in support of the SSC mission (e.g., publisher of the SSC News).

 

Following termination of the SSC project in 1993, Per moved to the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL).  During much of that time he was on leave to the Office of High Energy Physics, where he was Program Officer for a number of university grants.  He also consulted with BNL about the nascent RHIC magnet system. He retired from LBNL in 1996 but kept contact with the lab through a visiting scientist appointment and work at the Office for the History of Science and Technology at UC-Berkeley until 2005.

 

Dahl is the author of numerous scientific papers and several books:  From Nuclear Transmutation to Nuclear Fission, 1932-1939 (Institute of Physics Publishing, Co., Bristol, England and Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2002); Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy (Institute of Physics Publishing, Co., UK, Bristol England and Philadelphia, PA, USA, 1999), which was featured in the NOVA TV-production, Hitler’s Sunken Secret, DOX Production, London, 2004; Flash of the Cathode Rays: A History of J.J. Thomson’s Electron (Institute of Physics Publishing, Co., UK, Bristol, England and Philadelphia, USA, 1997); Superconductivity: Its Historical Roots and Development from Mercury to the Ceramic Oxides (American Institute of Physics, New York, 1992); Ludvig Colding and the Conservation of Energy Principle: Experimental and Philosophical Contributions, The Sources of Science N. 104 (Johnson Reprint Corp., New York and London, 1972).

 

Throughout his life, Dahl was able to pursue his love for physics, art and his family.  While at Brookhaven, he was a president of the South Bay Art Association (1967-1968), and he was also the president of the Brookhaven National Laboratory Art Society for several years.  He was a fellow of the American Physical Society.

 

He is survived by his devoted wife of 45 years, Eleanor, and two sons: Erik (married to Christa), of Pebble Beach, CA; and Thomas (married to Jo) and two grandchildren, Emily and Alex, of Westford, MA. 
 

Peter Wanderer, Brookhaven National Laboratory, NY
Eleanor Dahl, Emeryville, CA
Erik J. Dahl, Pebble Beach, CA and Thomas F. Dahl, Westford, MA

Akira Tonomura Passed Away at 70

May 2, 2012 (PO8); updated May 7, 2012 (PO8-1).  Akira Tonomura of Hitachi Central Research Laboratory died of pancreatic cancer early on May 2, 2012, at a hospital in Hidaka, Saitama Prefecture, Japan. He was 70. Tonomura was best known for developing electron holography for observing microscopic structures in matter using the wave nature of electrons and confirming the so-called Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect, the existence of which had long been disputed among physicists.  He was tipped as a future Nobel Prize winner for years.  The sad news above we cite after the online Kyodo News of May 2, 2012. 

 

Tonomura was born on April 25th, 1942.  He graduated from Tokyo University (1965) and obtained his two doctoral degrees from Nagoya (Engineering, 1975) and Gakushuin (Philosophy/Physics) Universities. Joined Hitachi in 1965 and 

performed part of his doctoral research at Tübingen University, Germany (1973-1974 under G. Möllenstedt). In 1999 he became Fellow of Hitachi, the most prestigious level attainable there by a scientist. In 2001 he became also the Group Director of Single Quantum Dynamics Research Group at RIKEN.  From 2003 to 2005 he served as President of Japanese Society of Microscopy.

 

After being for some years a visiting professor at Toyo University, TIT and Denki University, he became Professor of Toyo University (2008-2010).  In 2011 was appointed Professor of Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University.

 

Tonomura was Fellow of numerous societies of which we mention here the Japanese Society of Appl. Phys., APS (from 1999), the Microscopy Society of America, Eur. Phys. Soc., Institute of Physics (UK, 2007) and of AAAS (USA, 2007).  Of his many honors and awards we list here the Nishina Memorial Prize (1982), Asahi Prize (1987), Japan Academy Prize and Imperial Prize (1991), and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics (1999, USA).  He became Member of Science Council of Japan (2005), Foreign Associate of Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science (2006), and Member of the Japan Academy in 2007.

 

Tonomura’s contributions to superconductivity started nearly a quarter of century ago when his group studied the AB effect and made the first single flux quantum observation by electron-holographic spectroscopy1. Subsequently, he and his group made real-time observations of vortex lattices in type II superconductors2 by Lorentz microscopy, and published multiple contribution on studies of such lattices and flux pinning in   low- and high-Tc superconductors. The more complete overview of his numerous achievements in science can be found here.

¹T. Matsuda et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 62 2519 (1989).
²K. Harada et al., Nature, 360 51 (1992).

 

Milan Polák Passed Away at 74

 

February 2, 2012 (PO7).  Slovak scientist, Dr. Milan Polák, passed away on January 31st, 2012, after a severe short illness.  His rather sudden departure at 74 came as a sad surprise to his colleagues and co-workers in Slovakia and abroad.  He has been well-known to the superconductivity community through his active studies of electromagnetic properties of superconductors, superconducting magnets and devices, in particular on AC losses and related problems.

 

Milan Polák, January 31, 2012

 as Alexander von Humboldt Scholar, 1983 – 84 as lecturer at the L´Úniversité National de Gabés in Tunis and 1992–95 as visiting scientist in the Applied Superconductivity Center, Madison. Since 1960 he is with the Institute of Electrical Engineering (IEE), Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, Slovakia.

 

Polák made significant contributions to applied superconductivity, e.g., designed and tested NbTi coils for the generation of magnetic fields at industrial frequencies, AC loss measurements of superconductors and superconducting coils, development of low AC loss YBCO superconductors. He successfully managed several national and international research projects and published about 190 publications in international journals.

 

For 50 years he was active in the Institute Electrical Engineering of SAS and, to the end of his activity, liked the “hands on” experimental work in laboratory, which was a stimulating example also for much younger colleagues.  He was also as a member of several scientific boards and, as the director of IEE, was also involved in effective reorganization of the Institute of Electrical Engineering at the time of “political change”. 

 

Milan was a very creative colleague, and up to the end of his live stimulated others to useful activities.  His colleagues and collaborators appreciated his experience and knowledge as well as his friendship and sense for humour.  For this author it was a special privilege to spend with him the time of his last MT-22 conference (Sept. 2011) and also participate in experiments performed together during his last years.

P. Kováč
IEE SAS

Antonio Barone Dies on December 4, 2011

December 10, 2011 (PO6).  Antonio Barone (AB) prematurely passed away on Dec 4th 2011 at the age of 72, after a one-year battle with cancer. He left behind his wife Sveva and his two sons, Alberto and Livio. Antonio was currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Napoli Federico II, where he had been teaching for about 40 years.

The initial research activity of AB was in the field of nuclear physics. In this context, almost 45 years ago, the Ge “Lithium drift” semiconductor detectors represented a novelty, due to the high energy resolution allowed by those devices. Superconductors stimulated new approaches to radiation detection and this motivated Antonio’s interests toward superconductivity.

Antonio Barone - December 4, 2011

 

In the 1967 the birth of the Laboratorio di Cibernetica of the CNR offered him the possibility to work in a joint project USA-Italy (University of Wisconsin, Madison - CNR Naples) in the field of superconductivity on the peculiar subject of the superconductive “Neuristors”. His research activity on Josephson junctions opened a wide variety of very stimulating subjects in which AB was deeply involved, ranging from the soliton propagation in “long” Josephson structures to fluctuations phenomena, from light-sensitive junctions and proximity effect to the development of innovative superconducting devices.

 

The strong interaction of AB with the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Academy of Sciences, in Moscow, characterizes a long period of his research activity with a precious merging of theoretical and experimental aspects. All this body of work converged into the famous monograph on the “Physics and Applications of the Josephson Effect”, written in collaboration with Gianfranco Paternò in 1982. This became rapidly the reference text for the Josephson effect, as documented by thousands of citations and the fact it was translated into Russian, Japanese and Chinese. In 1983, AB was awarded by the Academy of Sciences in Moscow the highest academic title of “Doctor of the Physical-Mathematical Sciences”, and later the coveted Kapitza Prize.

The discovery of high-Tc superconductors (HTS) opened new problems and perspectives. In this context, AB and his group, significantly contributed by reporting original results on the “archetype” high-Tc Josephson junctions. Of great impact were the studies on unconventional superconductivity, first developed for ”p-wave” superconductors, but definitely very inspiring for the d-wave experiments on HTS compounds, and later on the physics of HTS Josephson junctions.
 
Macroscopic quantum phenomena and “particle detectors” are the keywords and the logical paths where to bring back several relevant contributions of Antonio scattered in more than 40 years of activity. Topics of his interest ranged from the fundamentals of macroscopic quantum tunnelling to barrier penetration in nonstationary fields, to finally a project into a wider vision of macroscopic quantum phenomena in unconventional systems.

 

Antonio is universally considered not only the founder of the Superconductivity School in the Napoli area, but also as the “grande maestro” and one of the most representative physicists in Italy. He has filled very relevant positions of scientific management in Italy and participated in many international committees. He has significantly contributed to the popularization of superconductivity as a divulgator, as a professor, as a researcher and as a manager.

 

An intense wave of sympathy and friendships has arrived from all over the world testifying how his gentleness, his sense of science and his smile were a solid bridge of friendship and respect with colleagues, students and people of everyday life. This premature departure cannot be dissociated from so many years spent working together. This moment cannot be dissociated from the awareness of having had the privilege to deal with a real gentleman of science and life, a man of vision and perspective.

Shoji Tanaka of ISTEC Died Suddenly at 84

November 14, 2011 (PO5).  Professor Shoji Tanaka, the preeminent luminary of Japanese superconductivity community suddenly died of pneumonia on November 11, 2011, at the age of 84.  The Funeral ceremony was held on November 15th. 

 

The IEEE Council on Superconductivity and European Society for Applied Superconductivity express their sincere condolences to ISTEC and all Japanese colleagues.

 

Shoji Tanaka was born on September 17, 1927.  He obtained his B.S. in Applied Mathematics (1950) and Ph.D. in Engineering (1961) from the University of Tokyo.  In 1999 he became honorary D.Sc. degree from the Purdue University, USA.  In 1955 he was appointed Lecturer, in 1958 Associate Professor 

Prof. Tanaka at ISS2011, Oct. 24, 2011

and in 1968 full Professor of the University of Tokyo.  Upon his retirement in 1988 he was appointed Professor at the Department of Physics, Tokai University.  He was also Consultant Professor of the Shanghai University, China.

 

Professor Tanaka was best known worldwide for his group’s confirmation of high-temperature superconductivity in cuprate oxides (1986) and the leadership of the International Superconductivity Technology Center (ISTEC).   In 1988, he was appointed the first Director General of ISTEC’s Superconductivity Research Laboratory (SRL), which he directed until 2008.  In 1988 he also became the Vice President of ISTEC.  Currently, he was still Advisor to ISTEC/SRL.  In his role, he wielded significant influence in the Japanese science community.  We include the last unofficial photograph of him, a snapshot taken on October 24th at the ISS 2011 conference ( 24th International Symposium on Superconductivity, held at Tower Hall Funabori, Tokyo, October 24 to 26th), not much over two weeks before his passing away.

 

Shoji Tanaka was author or co-author of about 500 publications, of these over hundred preceding his first involvement with oxide superconductivity (in BaPb1-xBixO3 system) around 1984.  His earlier interests concentrated among others on magnetoresistance and galvanomagnetic effects in semiconductors, for example doped  Si, CdS, etc.  He was also active in various semiconductor device structures, electron transport phenomena, and charge density wave effects in two-dimensional materials.  He contributed to ESNF by his reminiscences “The History of ISTEC” (RN18, April 2011).

 

Professor Tanaka was decorated by the Emperor of Japan with the Purple Ribbon Medal in 1990 and with the 3rd Class Order of Merit of the Rising Sun in 1999.  He also received numerous prizes: the Technical Achievement Prize of the World Congress on Superconductors in 1988, and the Greatest Prize of the Japan Ceramics Association, also in 1988. In 2003, the Japan Society of Applied Physics presented to Prof. Tanaka the Outstanding Achievement Award, and in 2004 the IEEE Council on Superconductivity presented to him the IEEE Max Swerdlow Award for Sustained Service to the Applied Superconductivity Community. 

 

We make accessible the official ISTEC obituary received on November 15th.

Igor Yanson Deceased at 73

September 28, 2011 (PO4).  On July 25, 2011, Professor Igor Yanson has tragically passed away. Igor was born in Kharkov, Ukraine (USSR) on March 18, 1938. Although he never had a chance to meet his father, who fell victim to the Stalinist regime, due to his mother’s efforts he had graduated with honors from the specialized secondary music school and developed a keen interest in radio-electronics. Sharing these two passions throughout his life, in 1957 joined the Kharkov State University to study radio-electronics, and in 1958 the St. Petersburg (Leningrad) State Conservatory to study piano. Graduating cum laude from the former in 1961, he had pursued his passion for science at the Kharkov Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering, where he worked ever since. Being accustomed to finishing everything he started, in 1963 he also graduated cum laude from the conservatory as a performing pianist.

Igor Yanson 1938-2011

 

Upon choosing science as his true calling, already in 1964 he was the first to detect the radiation of the non-stationary Josephson effect in superconductors. For this discovery he received the Ukraine Youth Prize on science and technology in 1967. This work has been mentioned by Brian Josephson in his Nobel Prize lecture in 1973. From that moment and to his last day Igor Yanson remained an internationally renowned scientist, always at the frontier of experimental physics. In 1979 he published a seminal paper on DNA mass spectrometry, and in 1974 he had experimentally discovered a completely new and very powerful method in solid state physics – the Point Contact Spectroscopy (PCS). Together with his colleague Igor Kulik, who provided theoretical support, and others, he has perfected this method to its present state, where it has become an established tool, at hand in every laboratory, for the investigation of the electron-quasiparticle interactions in metals and other conductors at the nanoscale down to one-atom contacts.

For his work, and especially for PCS,  he received the Ukraine State Prize in 1980, the EPS Europhysics prize in 1987, the Humboldt Research award in 1996, and the Lisa Meitner Prize in 2008. In 1979 he was elected a corresponding member, and in 1992 he became a full member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In his 50 years at the Institute for Low Temperature Physics in Kharkov he had gathered in his department a team of scientists with whom he co-authored five monographs and over two hundred and fifty scientific articles in most renowned journals.  They will carry his work further.

Igor Yanson is survived by his wife, four children and five grandchildren, who inherited both his passion for music and for experimental science.

Ernst-Helmut Brandt Succumbed to Cancer

September 9, 2011 (PO3).  On September 1st 2011, Dr. Ernst-Helmut Brandt died peacefully (in his sleep) at home, thus succumbing to an inoperable pancreatic cancer. The vortex community in superconductivity thus lost one of best-known and respected theoreticians.

 

Ernst-Helmut Brandt was born in Berlin-Kaulsdorf on September 17, 1941, as the second son of the publisher and bookseller Helmut Brandt and Elise Brandt nee Stümpfle. His love of nature and his interest in technical tinkering Ernst Helmut developed already as a child. From October 1961 to June 1967, he studied physics at the University of Stuttgart and the Technical University and the Free University of Berlin (Summer 1966).  From June 1967 to June 1969 he finished the 

Ernst-Helmut Brandt

doctoral thesis under Professor Alfred Seeger at the Max PlanckInstitute for Metals Research and the University of Stuttgart. From December 1969 to October 1970 he was a visiting scientist at the Lomonosov University in Moscow. 

 

Since then, Ernst Helmut spoke fluently Russian and had many friends in and from the former Soviet Union.  In 1970, at the age of only 29, he got a permanent position as researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, Institute of Physics in Stuttgart.  The main area of his work was the theory of vortices in type II superconductors. With over 330 publications including 32 Physical Review Letters, and the total number of  11, 400 citations (1 paper 763 times, another 640 times) and a Hirsch (h) – index of 58 he belonged to the most successful physicists of Germany.  He served the community also by supervising numerous doctoral dissertations in many countries, partly in their native language. He had profound knowledge of Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese and Swedish.  After retiring in September 2006, he continued his scientific work, was attending scientific meetings and continued publishing.
 
Ernst Helmut Brandt made a lasting contribution to his field of endeavor and will be remembered as a model of excellent working attitude and highly ethical behavior in research.

Gert Eilenberger Passed away at 74

 January 14, 2011 (PO2).  German theoretical physicist, Prof. Gert Eilenberger, passed away on November 21st, 2010, after a severe short illness.  His rather sudden departure at 74 came as a sad surprise to his colleagues.  He has been well-known to the superconductivity community as the originator of Eilenberger equations, which are applicable to BCS-like superconductors.  These equations are a simplification of Gor’kov equations and are useful especially for superconducting alloys (1968).

 

Gert Eilenberger was born in 1936 in Hamburg, got his Ph.D. in 1961 under the well-known Friedrich Hund, and the habilitation (D.Sc.) in 1965, both at Göttingen.  Soon after a postdoctoral stint at Cornell (1965-1967) he became affiliated with the Cologne University and was appointed full professor in 1970. 

Gert Eilenberger (ca. 1980)

 

Eilenberger made significant contributions both to superconductivity, and to nonlinear dynamics.  For over 30 years he was active in the Research Center Jülich (KFA later FZJ, Jülich, Germany) and founded there the present “Institute of Quantum Theory of Materials”.  His activity included not only purely scientific work, but also various leading roles in the FZJ Senate, an advisory role at the DFG, the German equivalent of NSF (the US National Science Foundation), was Chairman of the Board of Europhysics Letters, member of the Academy of Sciences of NRW (Northrhine-Westphalia), etc.  As a DFG advisor he was particularly helpful in supporting effective reorganization of science in Dresden, East Germany, after the German reunification.   Once officially retired from FZJ, he became also quite active and successful in the communal politics of the City of Jülich.

 

Gert was a very engaged and passionate colleague with a strong instinct for what is right and beneficial to the community.  His colleagues and collaborators appreciated his deep and broad knowledge as well as his warm heart and sense of humor.   For this Editor it was a special privilege to know him and be able to interact with, also in matters of FZJ science policy of 1990s.

Hisashi Kado Succumbed to Cancer

December 27, 2010 (PO1).  Hisashi Kado, a pioneer of modern biomagnetic SQUID instrumentation in Japan passed away on December 22nd, 2010, after a three-year-long battle with cancer. He left behind his wife and three sons.

 

Hisahi was born on February 7th, 1948 and graduated from the Department of Biophysical Engineering, faculty of Engineering Science at the Osaka University in 1971.  His PhD degree he also obtained from Osaka University, in 1984.

 

In 1971 Hisashi joined the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL) and started his research activity by getting involved in measurements of human hearing system and developing non-invasive methods of functional measurement of biological system.  From mid-1980s on, he was developing SQUID and 

Hisashi Kado (ca 2007)

biomagnetic measurement systems at ETL, and eventually joined the Superconducting Sensor Laboratory (SSL), a MITI1 consortium-type project (1990-1996) to develop large, multichannel magnetoencephalography (MEG) systems for human brain research and diagnostics.  Hisashi was appointed the Research Director of SSL, a position equivalent to Chief Technical Officer in a company.  His SSL activity culminated in the development, commissioning and research use of a 256-channel whole-head MEG system (complete with a special magnetic shielded room) then the largest in the world.

 

In 1995 Hisashi was appointed Professor at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT), and organized there the Applied Electronics Laboratory of KIT, which he then headed.  The objective of this group has been to develop various measurement technologies for biomagnetism, applied physics and other industrial applications.  Hisashi’s and the group’s major success was the completion and industrialization of a 160-channel whole-head MEG system2 for medical research and diagnostics, which found use internationally, both in the US and in Europe.

 

For his achievements Hisashi received the New Technology Development Award of the “Japan Society of Medical and Biological Engineering, Science News”.

 

As his close collaborator, Gen Uehara, put it, “at SSL and KIT, Hisashi lead many young common researchers to achieve uncommon results, and eventually educated them to be next generation leaders in biomagnetism.”  His premature departure leaves a deep void which will be difficult to fill.

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W. James Carr Jr. Passed Away at 92

November 23, 2010 (HE52).  On November 16th, 2010, Walter James (“Jim”) Carr, Jr., author of the first useful monograph on ac losses in supercondicting composite conductors1 and of many important contributions to the field of magnetism and applied superconductivity, passed away at 92 at home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

 

Jim was born on May 6, 1918 in Knob Noster, Missouri.  He initially intended to be a journalist, but instead enrolled at the Missouri School of Mines in Rolla (now University of Missouri at Rolla), because of a full-tuition scholarship; in 1940 he graduated there with a BS in engineering.  He then entered 

Jim Carr (ca 1980)

Stanford University, CA, studied with Frederic Terman and graduated with MSEE in 1942.   Upon graduation he was recruited by the Westinghouse Research Laboratories (later R&D Center) in Pittsburgh to join the wartime effort and was involved in defense projects.  After the war, Westinghouse sponsored his graduate studies at Carnegie Tech (Now Carnegie-Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, PA.  He wanted to study physics to know the "why" behind the engineering.  When told he was too valuable to lose from the lab while getting a PhD, he went over his boss's head and was approved for graduate study with the endorsement that this was exactly the reason why he should have been approved and supported.  He graduated with a PhD in physics in 1951 under Frederick Seitz.

 

Jim spent all his active career of 43 years at Westinghouse and attained the highest non managerial rank of Consulting Scientist, a rare distinction in that organization.  In 1987 Jim was elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow for his contributions to theories of magnetism, and for development of the theory of alternating current losses in composite superconductors.  He also became Fellow of the American Physical Society.  A seminar at the Department of Physics, University of Maryland, features annually a W. James Carr, Jr. memorial lecture.

 

This Editor first read an important paper on magnetic anisotropy authored by Jim back in 1950s; it strongly influenced my own work at the very beginning of my professional career.  I was thus truly awed when meeting him in person and having the privilege of working on his side some twenty plus years later.  Those of us who knew Jim well admired equally his sharp mind, impeccably logical reasoning and his most courteous gentle manners.  He was a true gentleman.  Even after his retirement he remained quite active professionally; his last paper was published only 3 years ago.  Until very recently he could be often encountered at various professional conferences.  His departure is a big loss; we’ll miss him…

Michael Tinkham Passes Away at 82

Broad thinker advanced both the theoretical and

experimental understanding of superconductivity

November 23, 2010 (HE51).  Below we reproduce the integral text of the Harvard University obituary included in their press release of November 5, 2010.

 

Michael "Mike" Tinkham, whose latest appointment was as the Rumford Research Professor of Physics and Gordon McKay Research Professor of Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Department of Physics, passed away on November 4, 2010. He was 82 years old.

 

Born on February 23, 1928 in Green Lake County, Wisconsin, Tinkham earned his undergraduate degree at Ripon College in 

1951 and his Master's and Ph.D. degrees, both in physics, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1951 and 1954 respectively. He also spent a year at the Clarendon Laboratory of Oxford as a postdoctoral fellow. 

 

He joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1957, rising to full professor, and then left in 1966 for Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his career. Tinkham's research focused primarily on superconductivity, as captured in his classic text, Introduction to Superconductivity.

In his later years he was active in studying the unique properties of materials when sample dimensions are reduced to the nanometer range.

 

In the Journal of Superconductivity, Tinkham's former student Christopher Lobb '80 (Ph.D., Applied Physics), wrote:

Tinkham's awards and honors included election to the National Academy of Sciences; the receipt of the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize; and the Fred E. Saalfeld Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Science in 2005.

Praveen Chaudhari – Short Obituary

 

It also led to the development of the HTS coated conductor technology. Also at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), he supported superconducting materials research and participated in it.  The summary of his recent results and thoughts on the grain boundaries in cuprates is given in his plenary EUCAS 2009 talk pre-published in our Issue 11 (to appear in Superconductor Science and Technology 2010).  For his achievements, Chaudhari has been honored with a number of awards.  He was an APS Fellow and member of the US National Academy of Engineering.  We reproduce his photo dating a few years back.

Vitaly L. Ginzburg – Brief Obituary

November 10, 2009 (HE36).  Vitaly L. Ginzburg, 93, the co-author of the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) phenomenological theory of superconductivity preceding the microscopic BCS theory, died on November 8, 2009, apparently due to cardiac arrest.

 

Ginzburg, born on October 4th, 1916, in Moscow, Russia, graduated with Ph.D. in 1940 and D. Sc. in 1942. At that time he worked at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow. He made also significant contribution to astrophysics and to nuclear fusion, specifically the Soviet H- bomb. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003, essentially for the GL theory. Readers interested in Ginzburg’s personal story and his views

 should refer to his brief autobiography, and an interview he most recently gave the Physics World (IOP). We reproduce his relatively recent photo (2003).

Zdenek J. J. Stekly, Sc.D October 11, 1933-April 3, 2009

 

WAYLAND: Dr. Zdenek J. J. “John” Stekly, 75, succumbed on April 3, 2009 after a long battle with coronary heart disease.

He was born on October 11, 1933 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the son of the late Karel A. Stekly and Jindriska (Wolfstahl) Stekly.

 

Dr. Stekly was the beloved husband of Suzanne Gibbs Stekly of Wayland. He was the loving father of Susan Stekly Williams and her husband Stephen W. Williams of Framingham, Paul F. Stekly and his wife Ashby Free of Cave Creek, AZ and of the late J. Steven Stekly. He leaves 5 grandchildren, a niece and 2 nephews.

After escaping Nazi occupied Czechoslavia, Dr. Stekly relocated temporarily to England before moving to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil where he spent the majority of his youth. Accepted into MIT at the age of sixteen, Dr Stekly completed his studies, the first in his class, receiving a BS in Mechanical Engineering, and a Masters in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in 1955. In 1959 he received his Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering.

 

After working for AVCO Everett Research Lab, Dr. Stekly worked as chairman of Magnetic Corporation of America, specializing in the production of superconducting magnets for use in MRI Scanners, Maglev research, Dept of Defense and the Dept of Energy.

 

A pioneer in superconductivity applications, Dr Stekly developed the ‘Stekly Stability Criterion’ which defines the maximum efficient operating capacity of superconducting wire.

 

Inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 1981, Dr. Stekly was also a member of the American Physical Society and the New England Council. He was elected to the Board of Directors of the FSH Society, Inc (Muscular Dystrophy). He belonged to the Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity.

 

At the request of the family, there will be no services at this time. Private services will be held for the family at a later date. For those who desire, gifts in his memory may be sent to the FSH Society Inc., 64 Grove St, Watertown, MA 02472. (IEEE CSC)

 

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Organization, in particular in developing a hydrogen bubble chamber, essential for high-energy physics experiments in Japan. At the same time he established cryogenics – the necessary basic engineering – as a new academic discipline in Japan, and contributed to the development of applied superconductivity and cryogenics in collaboration with Japanese industry. (Read complete obituary.) (IEEE CSC)