Handbook of High -Temperature Superconductivity: Theory and Experiment

J. Robert Schrieffer

Mar 2007 · Springer Science & Business Media

About this ebook

Since the 1980s, a general theme in the study of high-temperature superconductors has been to test the BCS theory and its predictions against new data. At the same time, this process has engendered new physics, new materials, and new theoretical frameworks. Remarkable advances have occurred in sample quality and in single crystals, in hole and electron doping in the development of sister compounds with lower transition temperatures, and in instruments to probe structure and dynamics. Handbook of High-Temperature Superconductvity is a comprehensive and in-depth treatment of both experimental and theoretical methodologies by the the world's top leaders in the field. The Editor, Nobel Laureate J. Robert Schrieffer, and Associate Editor James S. Brooks, have produced a unified, coherent work providing a global view of high-temperature superconductivity covering the materials, the relationships with heavy-fermion and organic systems, and the many formidable challenges that remain.

About the author

J, Robert Schrieffer is a Nobel Prize winning pyhsicist who figured out how certain materials can convey electricity without resistance. His greatest accomplishment came as a graduate student in the 1950s, when he tackled the question of how electrical resistance disappears in certain materials known as superconductors. Superconductors are used in the magnets of most magnetic resonance imaging machines and for accelerating protons as the particle accelerators that study the smallest bits of the universe. Dr. Schrieffer was a graduate student of Dr. Bardeen¿s at the University of Illinois when he came up with a mathematical expression that described how the pairs of electrons coalesced into one large clump, allowing them to move together without scattering - that is, without generating electrical resistance. This idea became known as the "Theory of Superconductivity". John Robert Schrieffer was born on May 31, 1931, in Oak Park, Ill., to John H. and Louise (Anderson) Schrieffer. After studying electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for two years, Dr. Schrieffer switched to physics and graduated with a bachelor¿s degree in 1953. He completed his doctorate at the University of Illinois in 1957. He worked at the University of Birmingham in England, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1964.Dr. Schrieffer received the National Medal of Science in 1983. In 1996, he served a one-year term as president of the American Physical Society. J.Robert Schrieffer passed away on July 27, 2019 in Tallahassee, Florida at the age of 88.