Superconductors, Old and New - Rescheduled

Solid State Physics is a field which continuously renews itself through the discovery of new materials and new phenomena.  This has been particularly true for the subfield of superconductivity.  One of the leading figures in this field for more than six decades was Stanford's Ted Geballe.  We will review the progress in this field from Kammelingh Onnes's discovery of superconductivity in mercury in 1911, to the Matthias-Geballe ground-breaking discovery of high-Tc superconductivity in Nb3Sn, to the remarkable Bednorz-Mueller discovery of high temperature superconductivity in the lamellar copper oxides in 1986 to recent work on the Fe arsenides and selenides.  Research on superconductivity has produced theoretical insights which have implications not only for superconductivity itself but for systems as varied as liquid crystal gels to the fundamental constituents of the universe.

Speaker: Bob Birgeneau, Stanford University

Editor's Note: This speaker will now be speaking on January 21, 2025.  See our listing for Sharad Ramanathan's talk on this date.