In Superconductors, Japanese Emerge as Pioneers : Technology: Shedding a reputation as imitators, researchers are neck and neck with American counterparts. The strides reflect a strong commitment to basic science.

From the moment IBM researchers uncovered a revolutionary material that could transform modern electronics, Japan has served notice that it will no longer take a back seat to American basic science.

In October, 1986, a Tokyo University team heard that IBM researchers in Zurich were claiming discovery of a material that transmitted electricity far faster and more efficiently at higher temperatures than previously dreamed possible. If true, the phenomenon of “superconductivity” could usher in an age of lightning-fast computers, magnetically levitating trains, ultra-sensitive medical equipment and lower energy bills.

But the IBM paper left unanswered many critical questions, failing to establish irrefutable proof. Thus, many researchers around the world regarded it as another unverified claim of high-temperature superconductivity like those that had tantalized scientists for decades.

The Japanese, however, investigated. Working around the clock, they created a different recipe from IBM’s, containing lanthanum, barium, strontium and copper oxides. By developing superior materials, they provided the hard proof that the IBM report lacked: the world’s first identification of the crystal structure and first convincing evidence of two key superconductor properties. Their work “lit a fire under all the labs in the world,” kicking off the global superconductor stampede, said M. Brian Maple, a physics professor at the University of California at San Diego.

“I believe we opened a new field of science. For 20 or 30 years, scientists dreamed of this. And we reached it,” said Shoji Tanaka, director of Japan’s superconductivity research consortium who headed the Tokyo University team at the time.

But the Tokyo team did more than help open a new venue of scientific inquiry. It proved that Japan was ready and able to aggressively compete in basic science, long a bastion of unparalleled U.S. strength. From that first verification of high-temperature superconductors, to discoveries of new materials and processes, the Japanese have mounted a basic research effort as good and in some respects better than America’s. In fact, the U.S. Commerce Department concluded in May that the United States will begin “losing badly” to Japan in superconductor research and new product introduction.

The Japanese efforts in superconductivity signify a new age of original and innovative scientific research. Long accused of taking free rides on U.S. science, Japan is striving to cast off the label of imitator and become a pioneer of new technologies. Perhaps more than any other new field, Japan has made a mark in superconductivity.

Superconductors are materials that transmit electricity without the normal resistance that turns part of any electrical flow into useless heat. Because electricity can flow unimpeded, it travels faster. Because it doesn’t generate wasteful heat, it is far more efficient.

Such properties could cut the cost of generating electricity by 60% and of transmitting it via superconducting underground wires by 40%, the Argonne National Laboratory estimated last year. They make possible laptop computers with supercomputing power. That’s because electricity can travel at higher speeds through circuits packed more closely together than normal, heat-generating conductors. A superconductive transistor, the basic unit of a computer, works 1,000 times faster than a conventional transistor and with one-thousandth the energy.

In addition, superconductors can be used to create powerful magnetic fields that repel each other. That property has been used to develop levitating trains that speed along at more than 300 miles per hour on a magnetic cushion and an experimental ship that uses the force of magnetic repulsion to propel itself through the water.

Superconductivity was discovered in 1911, but commercial applications were limited because materials first had to be cooled to temperatures more than 400 degrees below zero Fahrenheit with an expensive substance called liquid helium. The 1986 breakthroughs demonstrated superconductivity at higher temperatures, and the University of Houston blew open the door to vast commercial potential one year later. Researchers discovered a superconductor based on yttrium that worked at warm enough temperatures to use liquid nitrogen, a coolant one-fiftieth the cost of liquid helium.

In the global sweepstakes to understand and exploit the tantalizing new field, the Japanese have distinguished themselves. They have contributed significant scientific advancements, including the establishment of half the world’s new oxide superconductors, through experimental recipes combining a variety of elements. They have committed more researchers than the United States--about 1,200 versus 1,000--even though they have half the population. They are spending nearly the same amount of money, despite a gross national product that is half as large.

New Direction

Although the U.S. government spends more--$130 million vs. Japan’s $70 million--Japanese companies nearly offset that gap with investments of $107 million compared to $73 million by U.S. firms, according to an April review by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment.

That congressional survey estimated that at least 20 Japanese firms had committed more than $1 million to high-temperature research programs, which tended to be broader in scope than U.S. competitors. The survey also found that Japanese firms reported a greater focus on basic research and a greater willingness to hang in for the 10 years or so required for commercial payoffs.

“The Japanese just have their whole act together,” said Bob Kamper, a laboratory director in the Commerce Department. “We seem to be more scattered in our efforts. I would guess it will be very hard to keep up with them.”

To many Japanese, the superconductivity sweepstakes is their chance to show the world that they can contribute first-class original research. (They have also made some of the wackiest contributions, such as claims of superconducting seaweed, comic books about the field and the first superconductor toy kit). For years, they have been heavily criticized for failing to carry their weight in basic research, commercially exploiting Western science instead. But unlike other fields pioneered in the United States, high-temperature superconductivity--often called high Tc for short--put the Japanese at the same starting gate.

“High Tc emerged just in time, when the issues of the originality of Japanese, the trade imbalance and the dispute in R&D; between the U.S. and Japan became apparent,” said Koichi Kitazawa, a Tokyo University chemistry professor and a leading authority in the field. “So it turned out to be an important field on which everybody paid attention on whether Japan could contribute.”

In particular, Tanaka urged his Tokyo research group to become world leaders in basic superconductor research. A semiconductor physicist, Tanaka conceived the famous national project to catch up with the United States in very large-scale integrated circuits in 1976. Although the project was wildly successful for the Japanese, establishing their global dominance in memory chips, it resulted in acrimonious charges of dumping and other unfair trade practices. Tanaka did not want to repeat that political controversy.

“We had been getting accused by the U.S. side that Japan did not contribute to basic science in the field of semiconductors, but only behaved as a big producer country taking over the market,” Kitazawa said. “(Tanaka) said superconductors might become another example . . . so he urged us to do basic science.”

They plunged in. Four months later, at an Anaheim technical conference in April, 1987, Kitazawa and others handed out 1,000 free copies of the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics containing 86 articles chock full of new research. U.S. physicists were astonished. “They managed to put this together almost before we published a word,” one Bell Laboratories scientist said at the time.

The articles ranged from the materials’ magnetic properties to their crystal structure. The glossy journal became the world’s first informal textbook on the field.

Since those early glory days, Japanese researchers have continued to score triumphs--particularly in materials research, which they consider the key to exploiting superconductivity. Today’s superconducting materials must be able to carry more electrical current, ideally at higher temperatures, withstand higher magnetic fields and be more easily shaped into wires, tapes and other devices before they can be widely commercialized. Thus, many Japanese are searching for new materials and trying to improve existing ones.

Some Americans appreciate the field’s importance. “More attention needs to be paid to this if we’re going to be competitive in the future,” Maple warned.

But the overall U.S. focus on materials research is nowhere near that of the Japanese, which is reflected by the proverb displayed on the desk of Koji Kajimura, a director in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry’s Electrotechnical Laboratory: “He who controls materials controls technology.”

“U.S. people are doing experimental research on already known materials, but in Japan, people are rather eager to find brand new materials which may have higher transition temperatures,” Kajimura said, referring to the temperature at which resistance to electricity sharply drops off.

One of Japan’s biggest advances was the 1988 discovery by Hiroshi Maeda, a director with the National Research Institute for Metals, of an entirely new class of materials based on the brittle, white metal bismuth. The bismuth-based materials are more chemically stable and easily processed than the two other major material groups being researched worldwide, which were uncovered by the University of Houston and the University of Alabama.

In 1989, another Tokyo University team discovered materials that carry currents with electrons rather than in the absence of them, upsetting the prevailing paradigm. “It threw the whole field wide open and ushered in a whole range of research,” said Gregory Eyring, a project director with the Office of Technology Assessment.

Serious Effort

Another notable advance was the development of a new process that increased the amount of electricity carried by a superconductor. Researchers must increase the materials’ ability to carry large amounts of current to generate magnetic fields strong enough for commercial products, such as power generators or super-fast ships and trains.

The advance by Japan’s public-private research consortium, the International Superconductivity Technology Center, did not achieve the commercial target for wires and other bulk materials--1 million amperes per square centimeter. But it came considerably closer to it.

Have such contributions proven that Japan can hold its own in innovative basic research?

“I believe so,” Kitazawa said firmly. “But perhaps there are people in the U.S. who do not like to admit it. They’d like to depict Japanese as copycats who tend to take over the fruits of basic science developed in the U.S. to mass-produce in Japan. They want to believe this is still the case, but actually things have changed.”

As an example, Kitazawa cited an American review last fall of Japan’s high-Tc research program. The Japan Technology Evaluation Center’s study, which was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, concluded that Japan had mounted a “deep, long-term commitment” comparable to that of the United States. But Kitazawa challenged its findings that the theoretical program was “less vigorous” than America’s and that the research was more systematic than creative.

Kitazawa said Japan’s strides in superconductivity research are a direct outcome of its wealth. “I would say Japan for the first time has become, in a sense, rich enough to think about basic research. A country which is still in a stage of catch-up cannot pay for a big effort in basic science. This was once true in the U.S. So I am always saying originality is sort of an aristocratic thing for a country to do,” he said.

In the private sector, most analysts believe that Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. has mounted the best basic research effort. NTT researchers have excelled in developing large, high-quality single crystals essential for investigating magnetic properties and other characteristics.

But the big research bucks are being spent by Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu and other major Japanese electronics firms. They have also scored the most commercially intriguing advances. Hitachi has developed the world’s first high-temperature logic circuit. When Toshiba unveiled the first high-temperature superconducting wire and tape in 1987, its share price climbed 15% before the Tokyo Stock Exchange halted trading.

Toshiba figures that it will take at least five years to increase the wire’s capacity to carry enough electrical current for commercial use. But, like other Japanese firms, Toshiba says it is committed to a long-term effort that began 25 years ago in low-temperature superconductivity and now, with the high-Tc discoveries, involves 200 researchers. The commitment has persisted even though only one application has proven profitable: magnetic resonance imaging machines, which can look inside the body with magnets and radio waves instead of X-rays.

Toshiba produced 40% of the 606 machines sold in Japanese hospitals last year, said Ken Ando, chief research scientist for the firm’s Advanced Research Lab. Developing high-temperature machines rather than the current low-temperature products would reduce costs and save energy.

“All Japanese think someday superconductivity will earn money,” Ando said. “There are very few people who cannot see the bright future of superconductors.”

That greater optimism is reflected in Japanese government estimates of the potential world market: $20 billion, four times larger than Commerce Department estimates of $5 billion.

Japan’s creative research is being led by people such as Hiroshi Maeda and Seigo Kotani. Maeda is a director for the National Research Institute for Metals, a national laboratory. In 1987, he discovered the bismuth-based superconductors in what is widely viewed as one of the field’s most important breakthroughs.

Josephson Junctions

Kotani is a Fujitsu Laboratories expert in Josephson junctions, speedy superconductive electronic switches named after the British physicist who invented them, Brian Josephson. Last year, Kotani designed the world’s first Josephson processor equipped with relatively limited memory and processing capacity that nonetheless performed 37 times faster than silicon and used one two-hundredth the power.

Both share a hallmark of creative people: an unbridled passion for their work that keeps them in their labs--by choice--on weekends and late nights.

Maeda, for instance, made his bismuth breakthrough in research conducted entirely on his own time. Bored with his managerial tasks, Maeda says his career fulfillment comes from the research he squeezes in before breakfast, after dusk and on weekends.

After Tokyo University’s 1986 announcement, Maeda began concocting various recipes in a quest for new superconductors. After months of futile experiments, he finally postulated that a mix of bismuth, strontium, calcium, copper and oxide might produce the desired behavior. On Dec. 24, 1987, a colleague brought him the test results with a grin and the greeting: “Nice Christmas present.”

The material superconducted at an even higher temperature than the University of Houston’s yttrium-based material. He is searching for more new materials.

“This is my hobby,” Maeda said. “Playing tennis, climbing mountains and studying high-Tc superconductors.”

For Kotani, a driving force was IBM’s abandonment of Josephson research in 1983, a move that influenced scores of companies, including NTT, to likewise leave the field. Kotani thus regards himself as keeper of a dying faith, and he speaks about it with an almost religious zeal.

“There are now less than 10 of us Josephson researchers in the world,” Kotani said. “We think if we give up, Josephson will be banished in the world. But I love Josephson technology. I want to release the first Josephson system. So I work hard.”

Fujitsu was able to retain its low-temperature Josephson work despite the IBM action thanks to steady funding from a MITI national project on supercomputers, said Shinya Hasuo, a deputy manager of Fujitsu. MITI is also funding 43% of Japan’s public research on high-temperature superconductivity, with other major programs in the Science and Technology Agency and the Ministry of Education.

The most distinctive project is MITI’s International Superconductivity Technology Center, a new experiment for linking industry to basic and applied research. Companies may send two researchers to the center and share in intellectual property rights for an initial donation of $800,000 and an annual fee of $80,000.

In an effort to internationalize, the center opened its doors to foreign firms in 1988. None, however, have elected to join the 46 Japanese full members. Nine foreign firms are among the 66 ordinary members, who receive access to the center’s information, journals and symposiums for $16,000 a year.

The Japanese government effort reflects the nation’s solid commitment to a field where commercial payoffs remain years away. Many experts in Japan and the United States say that kind of patience will ultimately prove more critical than blue-sky innovation as superconductor research moves past the feverish free-for-all stage and into steady, diligent science.

“We’re not good at steady funding and we’re not good at patient research. We managed to get a man on the moon, so we know how to do it, but there has to be some kind of incentive to do it,” said Mildred Dresselhaus, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who headed the superconductivity study by the Japan Technology Evaluation Center.

Eyring of the Office of Technology Assessment fretted that the U.S. private sector’s comparative underinvestment in superconductivity is indicative of a broader, troubling trend.

“I think it’s part of a larger picture of U.S. companies getting out of what they consider long term and high risk and a greater propensity of Japan to take risk,” Eyring said. “The result is, we’re about to be deluged with decade-long investments in research in Japan, and I think we’re going to be in serious trouble.”

WHERE U.S. COMPANIES STAND IN EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

Against Japan, the United States is. . .

Research and Product Technology Development Introduction Advanced materials even but losing behind and losing Advanced semiconductor devices even and holding behind and losing Artificial intelligence ahead and holding ahead and holding Biotechnology ahead but losing ahead but losing Digital imaging technology Even but losing behind and losing Flexible computer-integrated ahead and holding even and holding manufacturing High-density data storage even and holding behind and losing High-performance computing ahead and holding ahead but losing Medical devices ahead and holding ahead but losing and diagnostics Optoelectronics even and holding behind and losing Sensor technology ahead but losing even and holding Superconductors even but losing even but losing

Against the European Community the United States is. . .

Research and Product Technology Development Introduction Advanced materials ahead and holding even and holding Advanced semiconductor devices ahead and holding even and holding Artificial intelligence ahead and gaining ahead and holding Biotechnology ahead and gaining ahead and holding Digital imaging technology even but losing behind and losing Flexible computer-integrated ahead but losing behind and losing manufacturing High-density data storage ahead and holding even and holding High-performance computing ahead and gaining ahead and gaining Medical devices ahead and holding ahead but losing and diagnostics Optoelectronics even and holding ahead and holding Sensor technology ahead and holding even and holding Superconductors even and holding even and holding

Source: Technology Administration, Commerce Department