4/27/2009
The White House announced today (April 27) that the U.S. Department of Energy will fund the Center for Emergent Superconductivity, a collaboration involving scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Written by
The White House announced today (April 27) that the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science will invest $777M in Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) over the next five years. One of the new EFRCs, the Center for Emergent Superconductivity (CES), involves a collaboration among scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
As U.S. electrical energy consumption continues to grow, the nation’s electrical power transmission grid faces fundamental structural challenges of capacity, reliability and efficiency if it is to meet the needs of the 21st century. Electricity demand will grow by 50 percent in the US and by 100 percent globally by 2030, with nearly all of that growth in cities and suburbs where the overhead power lines and underground cables are nearly saturated. Power delivery and control solutions based on superconductors can solve these crises with demonstrated higher current carrying capacities over conventional cables, self-healing-fault current limiting capabilities, and substantial increases in efficiency. However, fundamental material challenges remain that must be addressed in order for superconductivity to have broad impact on the electrical grid.
The objective of the CES is to explore fundamental research issues in superconductivity to enable the design of new superconducting materials suitable for deployment of a superconducting power grid as soon as feasible in the 21st century. The CES will combine theoretical and experimental studies to elucidate the mechanism of superconductivity in high-temperature superconductors. This understanding will be used to propose viable and realistic new materials systems to investigate, to develop new ways to control the behavior of vortex matter, and to direct the discovery of new or improved families of superconducting materials with higher critical temperatures and critical currents.
Leading the UI group is Swanlund Professor and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics Laura H. Greene, who is the theme leader for materials in the collaboration and co-director for the Illinois effort. Joining Greene as Illinois co-director is Dale J. Van Harlingen, Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics. Other researchers from Illinois involved in the CES are James N. Eckstein (Physics), Peter Abbamonte (Physics), Anthony J. Leggett (Physics), S. Lance Cooper (Physics), Russell W. Giannetta (Physics), Raffi Budakian (Physics), Jian-Min "Jim" Zuo (MatSE), Philip Phillips (Physics), and Eduardo H. Fradkin (Physics).
The Illinois researchers bring a diversity of crosscutting experimental and theoretical tools to pursue three grand challenges: finding new strongly correlated superconducting materials, understanding the physical mechanisms that lead to strong correlation and high-temperature superconductivity, and controlling vortex matter to raise the current-carrying performance of superconductors.