Brian Josephson and the Royal Society Mond Laboratory
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Brian Josephson and the Royal Society Mond Laboratory John Clarke 1 Received: 30 July 2020 / Accepted: 3 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract I was a graduate student in the Royal Society Mond Laboratory, University of Cambridge, from 1964 to 1967. I describe how my listening to a seminar by Brian Josephson followed by a crucial suggestion by our thesis advisor, Brian Pippard, the very next day launched my career for the next one-half century. Keywords Josephson tunneling . SLUG . Voltmeter . SQUID
I was born and brought up in the City of Cambridge. After kindergarten, I entered the Perse School—4 years at the “Prep School” and 8 years at the “Upper School.” I was then fortunate to be accepted as an undergraduate at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and after 3 years received my Bachelor of Arts degree. In the autumn of 1964, I entered the Royal Society Mond Laboratory, on Free School Lane, Cambridge, to begin my graduate research. The Mond was attached to the Cavendish Laboratory. Free School Lane runs north-south in the center of Cambridge, and the part near the Mond is closed to cars. St. Benet’s’ Church, a beautiful Anglo-Saxon Church built in 1000–1050, stands at the northern end. In fact, since I had spent my entire life in the same city, I had begun to think I should try living in another city, and I applied to two other universities for graduate school. But it was preordained that I should go to the Mond. About 25-m south of the entrance to the Mond is another entrance, inside of which hangs a plaque commemorating the foundation in 1615 of the Free Grammar School that later became the Perse Schools. Stephen Perse left money in his will for the free education of 100 boys from Cambridge and nearby villages, hence “Free School Lane.” About 50-m north of the Mond entrance is a small shop that was my grandfather’s picture framing shop. My parents would leave me in my pram outside his window while they went shopping, and when I became a In celebration of the 80th birthday of Brian D. Josephson * John Clarke [email protected] 1
Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-7300, USA
teenager, my grandfather taught me to frame pictures. Thus, it was a foregone conclusion that I would spend my career as a research student in a lab situated between two buildings that played such formative roles in my life. My thesis advisor was Professor Brian (later Sir Brian) Pippard, who was world famous for his earlier experiments on superconductivity. He suggested several thesis topics, and the one that interested me most was measuring the resistance of the superconducting-normal metal (SN) interface. This involved measuring the resistance of SNS sandwiches in which the normal metal was sufficiently thick to inhibit a supercurrent. This experiment required a voltage sensitivity of 1 pV, which at the time was unprecedented. Brian suggested that I look into improving the sensitivity of a cryogenic galvanometer that he had developed with an earl
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