GA Has Head Start on Superconductivity
GA Technologies Inc. is betting that its understanding of ceramics, superconductors, magnetics and exotic metals gained largely through fusion and fission research--will provide an inside track in the race to develop a new generation of highly efficient superconducting materials.
La Jolla-based GA “may be one of the few U.S. firms that have experience with both superconductivity and ceramics,” GA Vice Chairman Linden Blue told a congressional hearing Wednesday in Washington.
GA has focused its research on the development of wires made from the new superconductors, Blue told the congressional panel. However, Blue, whose brother James Neal Blue is GA’s chairman, acknowledged that “making wires is a major challenge, since the ceramics crack easily when stressed.”
About 20 scientists at GA have joined the worldwide research push that has produced the superconductivity advances that are reported on an almost daily basis.
“The popular press has become our journal of record,” quipped Ken Partain, who directs GA’s Institute for the Development and Application of Advanced Technologies.
Minimal Resistance
Superconductivity is the broad term used to describe the ability of some materials to conduct electricity with minimal resistance.
The rapid advances will continue, according to Partain: “It would be real short-sighted to think that this would hit some sort of plateau very soon, given the rapidity in which information has hit the scientific community.”
For example, in February, after researchers in Houston and Alabama announced a new milestone, GA scientists reproduced the experiment within a week--even though the out-of-state researchers did not identify the newly discovered superconductor material. “We succeeded because we have the chemistry, solid state physics, ceramics and magnetic expertise,” Partain said.
GA has used advanced ceramics in its fusion and fission research, according to Partain, and the company manufactures magnets that use “old-style” superconducting materials. GA’s Applied SuperConetics division uses those “old-style” materials to build magnets that are sold to manufacturers of medical diagnostic imaging devices. SuperConetics supplies 15% of the world market for those magnets, according to Blue.
However, previous superconducting materials are worlds apart from the materials now being studied. In the past, superconductivity had been achieved only at hundreds of degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
Research moved on the fast track in January, 1986, when an IBM researcher in Zurich, Switzerland, discovered that ceramic metal oxides became superconductive at much higher temperatures than previously observed. Scientists in laboratories around the world subsequently produced materials that become superconductive at even higher temperatures.
Less Optimism
Blue believes that GA scientists will be able to harness the incredible efficiency of the new superconducting materials. During congressional testimony last week, he suggested that, in two years, GA might be able to build a prototype of the magnet that would be used in a proposed “superconducting supercollider.”
Representatives from other companies who testified at the hearing were less optimistic, and two experts suggested that it could take 10 years to develop devices that harness the new superconductors.
U.S. defense agencies, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will pump “several tens of millions of dollars” into superconductor research in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, according to Craig I. Fields, deputy director of DARPA.
DARPA expects to receive “several hundred” research and development proposals no later than July from industrial companies, universities and the federal government’s national laboratories, according to Fields.
GA has submitted proposals to DARPA and the Air Force, according to Partain.
