Applied Physics/Physics Colloquium: Bob Birgeneau - Superconductors, Old and New

Solid State Physics is a field which continuously renews itself through the discovery of new materials and new phenomena.  This has been particularly true for the subfield of superconductivity.  One of the leading figures in this field for more than six decades was Stanford's Ted Geballe.  We will review the progress in this field from Kammelingh Onnes's discovery of superconductivity in mercury in 1911, to the Matthias-Geballe ground-breaking discovery of high-Tc superconductivity in Nb3Sn, to the remarkable Bednorz-Mueller discovery of high temperature superconductivity in the lamellar copper oxides in 1986 to recent work on the Fe arsenides and selenides.  Research on superconductivity has produced theoretical insights which have implications not only for superconductivity itself but for systems as varied as liquid crystal gels to the fundamental constituents of the universe.

Professor Birgeneau received his Ph.D. in Physics from Yale University in 1966 with Professor Werner Wolf. He was on the faculty of Yale for one year and then spent one year at Oxford University. He was at Bell Laboratories from 1968 to 1975 and then went to MIT in September 1975 as Professor of Physics. In 1988 he became head of the department and in 1991 became Dean of Science at MIT. In 2000, he became President of the University of Toronto. In 2004 he became UC Berkeley’s Chancellor and joined the Physics faculty. He concluded his service as Chancellor at the end of May 2013 and is now the Arnold and Barbara Silverman Distinguished Professor of Physics, Materials Science and Engineering, and Public Policy.