Carolyn DePew
Staff Writer
The Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston celebrated its 10th anniversary Thursday. The day was marked with a symposium, "Frontiers of Condensed Matter Physics," and a community lecture, "Creativity in Science: A Public Dialogue."
The symposium, intended for a university level audience, was held in the Conrad N. Hilton Ballroom and consisted of lectures by six world-renowned scientists, three of whom hold Nobel prizes.
Texas Governor George W. Bush described the symposium as providing "a great opportunity to visit with fellow scientists and explore new challenges in physics" in a letter to the center.
Chen Ning Yang, Albert Einstein professor of physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, began the series of lectures with a presentation on the theory of Bose-Einstein condensation.
A Bose-Einstein condensate is a cohesive and incredibly massive "fuzzy atom" formed through the pressurization of many atoms, cooled to the brink of absolute zero. These meta-particles can be used for microscopic etching and could allow for the creation of even smaller microchips for computers and other electronic devices.
Carl E. Weiman of the University of Colorado in Boulder followed up with a lecture on current experiments with Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases, including the study of the interactions of several condensates.
German physicist Klaus von Klitzing followed with a lecture on nanoelectronics, a class of devices much smaller than microelectronics in which, unlike in microelectronics, "quantum phenomena dominate the electronic properties."
Richard E. Smalley, Director of the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, followed with a discussion of Buckytubes, a derivative of the now-famous Buckyball. Buckytubes have a much wider variety of applications than the Buckyball and are the focus of his current work.
Smalley said his research group's motto is, "If it's not (Bucky) tubes, don't do it."
These tubes are expected to be the strongest fibers ever made. They are 100 times stronger than steel and are unbreakable even when bent in half. They may be used to create molecular electronics, and "have application in virtually all technologies through where electrons flow."
Karl Alex Muller of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and the University of Zurich, and TcSUH Director Paul C. W. Chu ended the symposium with two presentations on high temperature superconductors, the study and application of which TcSUH leads in the world.
Chu's lecture in particular covered progress and approaches to challenges in the study of HTS.
Superconductivity at room temperature would allow for electricity to be conducted without energy loss or waste, but scientists have yet to achieve superconductivity above -164 degrees Fahrenheit and have not agreed upon the mechanics of HTS.
The symposium was followed with a community lecture on science and research.