Seminario "Past, present and future of high temperature superconductivity technology: a personal perspective after a 3-month visit and a 40-year career" - Prof. L. Civale
Abstract del seminario: "The end of my 3-month visiting position at PoliTo is approaching. During that time, I taught part of a course to a crowd of Master students and a full course to a smaller group of PhD students, both on Applied Superconductivity. I also continued my collaborative research with the superconductivity group, including traveling to Frascati to deal with our neutron irradiation studies at the FNG and learning about Magneto Optical Imaging techniques, while simultaneously trying to improve my Italian (with somewhat limited success) and enjoying Torino enormously. This is a good time to reflect on how this stay has enriched me, what naturally leads me to consider how I ended up here, and what lies in the future".
Bio del docente:
Leonardo Civale is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has nearly 40 years of research experience in materials science and condensed matter physics, mostly on superconductivity, both on applied and basic science aspects. He completed undergraduate studies in Physics at the Univ. of Buenos Aires, Argentina (1983), and received his Ph.D. in Physics at the Instituto Balseiro, Bariloche, Argentina (1989). He was a postdoc at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (1989-1992) and spent short periods as visiting scientist at ORNL (1992) and several institutions in Europe (Atominstitut der Österreichischen Univ. Vienna, Austria - K. Onnes Lab, Leiden Univ., Holland - Katholieke Univ. Leuven, Belgium - Institut Ciencia dels Materials, Univ. de Barcelona, Spain, 1993). He returned to Bariloche as professor (1993-2001), and in 1998 he became Head of the Low Temperature Group. In 2002 he joined Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) as Physics Team Leader of the Superconductivity Technology Center, whose goal was to develop Coated Conductors (CC), which are wires of High Temperature Superconductors (HTS), through a National Program of the DOE Office of Electricity. There, he worked in close collaboration with USA CC manufacturers (SuperPower, AMSC, MetOx). In 2020 he became Leader of the MPA-Quantum Group, until he retired in Dec. 2022. Leonardo’s research on critical current density (Jc) and vortex pinning in HTS has significantly contributed to shaping the topic. The study where he first showed that columnar defects created by heavy ion irradiation produced large Jc enhancements in YBa2Cu3O7 (L. Civale et al., PRL 67, 648 [1991]) has ~1570 citations. At LANL, he showed that BZO inclusions in CC produced strong Jc increases. Their publication (J.L. MacManus-Driscoll et al., Nat. Mat. 3, 439 [2004], ~1350 citations) triggered a flurry of research, with full conference sessions dedicated to second phases additions in HTS. His team performed the first study of vortex physics in a CC in pulsed magnetic field (M. Miura et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 96, 072506 [2010]), (fields up to 65T), and the first study of Jc in pulsed field (M. Leroux et al., Phys. Rev. Appl. 11, 054005 [2019]). He has ~ 250 publications, > 14500 citations and h-index 57 (Google Scholar). Leonardo is now an Affiliate to the University of Connecticut at Storrs, CT, USA, and his main present research interests include the use of CC for fusion reactors and space applications.