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Posts Tagged superconductivity

Is superconductivity the wrong science for New Zealand? Shaun Hendy Mar 24

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After the announcements of the Prime Minister’s Science Prizes earlier in the month, Rod Oram wrote a piece for the Sunday Star Times, where he discussed the type of science that won the top prize.  As I wrote at the time, Jeff Tallon and Bob Buckley from Industrial Research Ltd in Lower Hutt were awarded this prize for their discovery of a ceramic material that remains a superconductor at temperatures close to the boiling point of liquid nitrogen.

In his opinion piece, however, Oram claimed that research into high temperature superconductivity is the wrong type of science for New Zealand. He wrote:

We have virtually no experience, scale or markets in these areas of science, technology and manufacturing.  From a commercial perspective it was completely the wrong science to pursue. We must focus instead on the life and environmental fields where we have the scale and the leadership to attract international collaborators.

Oram is by no means alone in seeing New Zealand’s future lying solely in the life and environmental sciences.  Despite the fact that high-tech manufacturing sector is now our third biggest export earner, the central dogma of New Zealand economic thinking seems to be that we can’t compete in this area.

I disagree. In new knowledge-based industries, small chance events can snowball to deliver competitive advantage to a region as an industry grows in scale.  I’m going to look at this in more detail as I work my way through Philip McCann’s paper – for now lets look at a few examples.

In the 1930s, the US electronics industry was firmly established on the eastern seaboard.  It would have seemed inconceivable to any analyst that in fifty years’ time, the industry would have shifted across the continent to distant San Francisco.  Similarly, in the 1980s, who would have guessed that the world mobile phone market would be dominated by technologies developed in Helsinki, a city the size of Auckland on the wrong side of the Baltic, or that the 3D movie industry would come of age in a sleepy seaside suburb of Wellington?

I have heard many explanations for why the semiconductor industry came to be localised in Silicon Valley, from the presence of San Francisco’s large ham radio community in the 1930s to the fact that William Shockley’s mother lived in Palo Alto.  These explanations are only offered post hoc of course; no one would suggest we base our economic growth strategy on ‘maternal proximity’ theory.

So while we may not be able to say what conditions are sufficient to establish regional high-tech industries, there are certainly lessons to be learnt about what might be necessary.  The regional presence of a world class research university such as Stanford or the University of Helsinki may be essential to deliver the large number of skilled knowledge workers that will be needed.  My analysis of Finland shows how a region can develop scientific and engineering capability in a new field in less than a decade.  Public investment can also be important – Silicon Valley was supported by decades of military contracts before its semiconductor industry was able to deliver competitive consumer products.

New industries have to start somewhere.  Provided New Zealand can supply our nascent high temperature superconductivity industry with the right people and sufficient levels of investment, Lower Hutt is no more disadvantaged than San Francisco in the 1930s, Helsinki in the 1990s or Miramar in the 2000s.

In order to ensure that new industries can be started in New Zealand, we need to be prepared to invest in talented people and their ideas, whether they are in superconductivity, making movies or kiwifruit.  We simply don’t have enough of these that we can afford to pick and choose among them: we must support bright ideas where we find them.

New Zealand’s million dollar scientists Shaun Hendy Mar 10

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Congratulations to all the winners of the inaugural Prime Minister’s science prizes. I am particularly pleased to know four of the winners personally.

Dr Jeff Tallon and Dr Bob Buckley, from Industrial Research Ltd, are two of New Zealand’s greatest physical scientists.  I discussed some of their work in a blog post last month.  Twenty five years ago, the Jeff and Bob took New Zealand to the forefront of research and development in high temperature superconductivity, and have kept us there ever since.  Their work has not only had immense scientific impact, but has led to the development of a superconductivity industry in New Zealand.  Jeff is a Principal Investigator in the MacDiarmid Institute, and Bob is a member of the Institute’s governance board.  Bob and Jeff have both been important mentors in my career.

Elizabeth Connor is the winner of the Science Communicators Prize.  I taught Elizabeth at Victoria University of Wellington during her BSc(Hons) in physics.  After her honours degree, Elizabeth travelled overseas to pursue further training in science communication, before returning last year.  She has since worked with us at the MacDiarmid Institute on several projects, including our Interface newsletter, and for Radio New Zealand.  You can read some of her work in our newsletter here.  She is one of our up and coming science journalists. I hope that Elizabeth continues to go from strength to strength in her journalism.

John Watt is another winner with MacDiarmid Institute affiliation.  We knew about John’s prize in advance as he was the winner of last year’s MacDiarmid Young Scientist of the Year award, which has now been superseded by the Prime Minister’s Emerging Scientist award.  John submitted his PhD thesis earlier this year and is awaiting his oral exam at the moment.  You can see some of John’s work on palladium nanocrystals here.  After he graduates, he is going to work with a Victoria University spin out company.  The prize will give him an excellent opportunity to become one of New Zealand’s scientific entrepreneurs.

Kiwi superconductivity industry overcomes resistance Shaun Hendy Feb 08

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This week, New Zealand hosts the 18th International Superconductivity Industry Summit, where multi-national heavy-weights like Siemans AG will rub shoulders with New Zealand-based companies such as General Cable NZ Ltd and HTS-110.  As the superconductivity industry matures over the next decade, these New Zealand companies have an excellent chance of becoming significant export earners.  How did New Zealand come to have a superconductivity industry in the first place, and why are multi-national companies descending on Te Papa later this week to hear what we have to say?

Superconductivity was discovered almost 100 years ago, when it was found that many metals completely lose electrical resistance once they are cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero (-273 degrees C).  When metals become this cold, rather than jostling and shoving their way through an electrical wire, electrons can pair up and ‘waltz’ quantum mechanically along the wire without resistance.  Today, to produce the intense magnetic fields needed by MRI machines, expensive liquid helium is used to cool metal electromagnets to temperatures at which they will superconduct.

Since the original discovery, many scientists have have tried and failed to find a material that would superconduct at room temperature:  such a material could allow us to dramatically shrink any device that needs powerful electromagnets, including electric motors.  I was lucky enough recently to see a talk by Jeff Tallon, one of New Zealand’s leading physicists, on the prospects for room temperature superconductivity.  Unfortunately, recent work by Jeff and James Storey (a kiwi physicist at Cambridge) suggests that room temperature superconductivity is unlikely to be possible, and even if it does exist, would not be practical enough for real applications.

However, thanks to Jeff and many other scientists at Gracefield in the Hutt Valley, we have the next best thing.  In the 1980s, Jeff and his colleagues at the DSIR (now Industrial Research Ltd) discovered a material that would superconduct at temperatures where nitrogen is a liquid (-196 degrees C).  Liquid nitrogen is a much cheaper coolant than liquid helium, so Jeff’s material makes it feasible to exploit superconductivity in many technologies beyond MRI machines.

So why can’t you catch a 300kph superconducting maglev train to visit Jeff in Lower Hutt two decades on?  Inconveniently, these ‘high temperature’ superconductors have proved to be very brittle, and it has taken more than 20 years to figure out how to turn them into wires that are ductile enough for real world applications.  Even then, these superconducting wires are difficult to work with, and require lots of know how to turn them into working electromagnets.  It is in these technologies that New Zealand has developed an edge. 

What is particularly interesting to me is the role that intellectual property has played in the development of this sector in New Zealand.  Jeff and his team only won the patents for their superconductor (BSCCO) after a long battle, but the paper value of these patents will quite possibly be dwarfed by the value of the industry that has been established around them.  Yet it was these patents that attracted the patient investment by government and others, which has been necessary for developing New Zealand’s capabilities in high temperature superconductivity.  These capabilities are now embodied in the skills and know how of a large team of scientists and engineers. 

In turn, this IP was generated by basic research undertaken at the DSIR.  The research was not carefully vetted by a purchasing agency prior to proceeding, nor was it undertaken after a careful assessment of New Zealand’s competitive advantage.  Rather, it was an inspired piece of ‘bottom-up’ science, by a team of talented New Zealanders, responding rapidly to international discoveries reported in the latest scientific journals. 

New Zealand has got this far with superconductivity because it backed a team of scientists conducting fundamental research in a highly competitive field, and because it then showed the patience to invest in developing the resulting technology for two decades.  Overseas investment has been crucial, and so the HTS wire itself is now made in the US by American Superconductor.  While the success of New Zealand’s superconductivity industry is not yet a sure thing, and further investment will be needed for it to grow, it is now earning export revenue with high-tech products that no other country can match.