The search for high temperature optimal superconductors is motivated by the immense impact such discoveries would have on the electrical power transmission and storage, transportation, communication systems etc. This elaborate effort thrives on the availability of experts scientists, combining skills from materials synthesis to complex electronic, magnetic and structural characterization.
This award provides support for junior researchers to attend a joint US-China Winter School on Superconductivity held in Hong Kong January 21-23, 2013. The workshop will feature attendance and invited talks by many prominent scientists from both United States and China. By bringing young scientists together for the winter school, they will have a unique opportunity to learn about the century-long history of superconductivity, as well as experimental and theoretical developments both in the context of conventional and unconventional superconductors. The interactions are likely to catalyze future collaborations between graduate and postdoctoral students from US and China, two of the most active and successful communities currently involved in the search for optimal superconductors.
The result of bringing 16 US and 30 Chinese young scientists (graduate students and postdocs) together for the Winter School on Superconductivity was that collaborations were facilitated and initiated with considerable success. - Dr. Phillip King from Prof. Kyle Shen's group (Cornell) and Dr. Carolina Adamo from Prof. Mac Beasley's group(Stanford) are synthesizing and doing ARPES on (Bi, La)PbO3. Dr. Adamo has made several trips to Cornell for experiments. - Dr. Thomas Saerbeck and Dr. Juan Pereiro in Prof. Ivan Schuller's group at UCSD have started and are continuing to work in collaboration with Hai-Hu Wen from Nanjing University on imaging of vortices in a variety of superconducting systems. They also did an extensive study of possible superconductivity in CuCl which came out of this meeting. A paper is already accepted, "Ferromagnetism in partially oxidized CuCl" Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, Available online 23 July 2013. Several other collaborations that started at the Hong Kong meeting are underway with the groups of Beasley, Risbud, Maple, Aronson, Larkins. In all these the UCSD group is measuring inhomogeneous samples using the newly developed Magnetic Field Modulated Microwave Spectroscopy. - Dr. Valentin Taufour, a postdoc in Prof. Paul canfield's group at Iowa State University and Ames Lab formalized a collaboration with Dr. Shanta Saha (UMD) during this meeting, to study rare earth doped CaFe2As2 compounds.
