Accelerating HTSC Electronics
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Accelerating HTSC Electronics George A. Keyworth II
It's almost three years now since high température superconductors burst into— and in some cases changed—our lives. Since then, R&D has solidified, refining earlier discoveries, extending them slowly into other realms and other chemistries, and cautiously exploring possible applications. The initial rush of public excitement has subsided, and most of the world has settled into a wait-and-see attitude about the importance of high température superconductivity. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that the waitand-see attitude has also cropped up in some places where it shouldn't hâve—in places that affect the direction and intensity of the R&D process. I'd like to explore that situation hère, and in doing so I'd like to pose, and try to answer, four questions. The four questions are thèse. First, did we respond appropriately to the initial opportunity? Second, are we conducting the right mix of R&D now? Third, how effective and appropriate is government's rôle in superconductivity R&D? And fourth, has the response from business been appropriate to the opportunity? My own reaction to the initial announcement was one of tremendous excitement— but not for the same reasons as a lot of other people. Obviously, to some extent it was the sheer delight at seeing a long-time barrier shattered—having spent many years myself working in low-temperature research. But despite my own longstanding involvement, my thoughts turned quickly to possible implications in another area— electronics. Given the materials problems of the new superconductors, and what the current density limitations are, it seemed that thin-film applications might be the easiest to realize. And IBM and others had done a great deal of récent work on Josephson junction effects in cold superconductors, so we already had a base to build on. *Remarks to the Conférence on Superconductivity: The Manufacturing Challenges, Oak Brook, Minois, October 18,1989, sponsored by The Society of Manufacturing Engineers.
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But, virtually ail the vocal attention centered initially on applications requiring bulk superconductors—notably wires and magnets. In the articles being written about what superconductivity might do for us, electronics was usually a paragraph near the end, and even that was taken up mostly with applications to SQUIDs for limited military uses. There were a couple of reasons for that persistent slant. Those were the dominant existing applications for superconductivity in most people's minds. People could easily see the leaps in performance if superconductivity could be applied to mechanical or power Systems— what emerged in the public eye as flying trains, super-efficient motors, and even tabletop particle accelerators. The other reason for that skewed interest is human nature: People are quick to picture something as a replacement or an extension of something that already exists. We might call that the "vacuum tube phenomenon." When the transistor was first announced, it was seen, and initially pursued, as a replacem
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