July 10, 2001

WKU Physics Majors Receive Research Grant

Bowling Green, Ky. - Three Western Kentucky University physics majors recently received a $2,000 research grant from a program sponsored by the American Institute of Physics.

Angela Adams of Elizabethtown, Gavi Begtrup of Nashville, Tenn., and Kenneth Purcell of Henderson will use to grant from the Sigma Pi Sigma Undergraduate Research Program to support an "Investigation of Transport Properties of High-Tc Superconducting Materials."

The research project will take place in the WKU Solid State Physics Laboratory during the 2001-02 academic year. Dr. Doug Harper, an associate professor in the WKU Department of Physics and Astronomy, will serve as the faculty adviser for the project.
Dr. Harper provided the following explanation of superconductivity and the WKU student project:

Superconductivity is a phenomenon wherein the electrical resistance of a material is drastically reduced to zero below a certain temperature, called the critical temperature (Tc). Significant performance enhancements can be realized in many electrical and electronic components when the electrical, magnetic and thermal properties of superconductors are exploited.

Superconductors have potential applications in a variety of fields, including ultra-efficient power lines and power storage devices that suffer no power loss through resistance, radio-frequency microelectronic circuits leading to supercomputers with speed and capacities orders of magnitude beyond today's capabilities, frictionless bearings, and super fast frictionless trains levitated by magnetic forces.

Since the first discovery of superconductivity in mercury below 4K (Kelvin) by H. Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911, scientists have continued to search for materials with successively higher and higher superconducting transition temperatures. A 1986 breakthrough by researchers at Bell Labs has led to the discovery of a number of copper-oxide based superconductors with critical temperatures even as high as 130K. This class of superconductors, called high-temperature superconductors (HTS), has the significant advantage that they have critical temperatures above 77K which is obtainable with the relatively inexpensive cryogen liquid nitrogen.

The three WKU students will fabricate HTS materials and will measure their transport properties (the current-voltage characteristics, the dependence of resistivity on temperature and applied external magnetic field, and the flux flow behavior of a magnetic field through the sample) with a goal of obtaining a better understanding of the processes responsible for superconductivity at high temperatures.

For more information, contact Doug Harper at (270) 745-6194. More WKU news is available on the World Wide Web at www.wku.edu. If you'd like to receive WKU news via E-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.