From BCS to Vortices: A 40 Year Personal Journey through Superconductivity from Basic Research to Power Applications

A century has passed since the discovery of superconductivity in Leiden followed 75 years later by the Great Leap Forward in \underline {Zuerich}.\footnote{``20th Anniversary of the Woodstock of Physics,'' APS March Meeting 2007, Denver, CO.} This talk will chronicle the author's trajectory through the science and technology of superconductivity first taking off with his IBM career in fundamental research on organic and layered copper oxide perovskite superconductors to a final landing at EPRI to explore applications of the latter to the electric power industry. Although many fundamental mysteries remain with respect to the copper and iron compounds, especially regarding the BCS pairing mechanism, nonetheless a significant number of successful demonstrations of cables, rotating machinery, storage and power conditioning equipment employing both low-and high-T$_{C}$ superconducting \underline {materials}\footnote{P. M. Grant, IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercon. \textbf{7}, 112 (1997).} have been undertaken worldwide since the decade of the 1960s to the present. However, massive application to the power industry has yet to take place or be inserted into utility long-range planning \underline {cycles}.\footnote{P. M. Grant, ``Superconductivity in Power Applications,'' submitted to the ICEC-ICMC 2010 Conference Proceedings.} Although there will certainly be a relatively small number of opportunistic deployments in those situations where superconductivity has a compelling advantage over conventional technology, its time will more likely await a future revolution in energy and electricity infrastructure such as a \underline {symbiosis}\footnote{P. M. Grant, C. Starr and T. J. Overbye, ``A Power Grid for the Hydrogen Economy,'' Scientific American, July 2006, p.76.} of nuclear and hydrogen with superconductivity. Perhaps the distant future will even deliver the \underline {dream}\footnote{P. M. Grant, Physics Today, May 1998.} of a room temperature superconductor.