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Plenaries





Bernard Bigot
Director-General of ITER Organization

"Superconductivity and Fusion: an enabling technology for the success of ITER"
ITER is an essential step on the road to the demonstration of the scientific and technological feasibility of thermonuclear fusion as a sustainable source of energy for Humankind.
The ITER Tokamak is designed to achieve stable plasma discharges ranging from 500 s with a fusion power of 500 MW to steady state burns of 400MW, with an energy amplification factor (Q) of 10.
It is a test bed for critical fusion reactor technologies, such as plasma facing components and high power plasma heating sources, and should demonstrate the safety and low environmental impact of fusion power.
ITER is an unprecedented political and management challenge between 7 partners (China, Europe, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States) representing more than half the world population, who provide 90% of the components as in-kind contributions.
At the heart of the reactor will be one of the most sophisticated superconducting magnet systems ever built, contributed by six of the ITER partners and representing about 20% of the ITER cost.
The system offers many design and manufacturing challenges, including: the total weight of advanced Nb3Sn superconducting strands required (nearly 700 tons), which has called up for an unprecedented world-wide ramp up of industrial production capability from a state of a few tones/year, the coil sizes (over 300t for individual coils), which raise huge manufacturing and handling issues, the impressive stored energy (51 GJ), which requires special quench detection and protection techniques and very high voltage advanced insulation technology at 30kV, the assembly of components with dimensions up to 25m with tolerances of a few millimeters and finally a successful commissioning following the enforcement of rigorous and uniform QA/QC to nuclear safety standards and procedures for all suppliers from the 6 partners involved, supported by careful performance qualification of subcomponents.
Manufacturing of this system is now well advanced, with for example about 500t of Nb3Sn strand completed, and cabled into conductors ready for winding.
Series production of some of the coils is already underway and all the most critical performance tests of subcomponents have been successfully passed, giving full confidence that the system will achieve its overall performance and reliability goals.

Dr. Teruo Izumi
Deputy Director General Concurrent Division Director,
International Superconductivity Technology Center (ISTEC), Kanagawa, Japan

"REBCO coated conductors in Japan - status and future"
Since the discovery of HTS, lots of efforts for realizing long REBCO coated conductors (CCs) with high performances have been made in the world. In Japan, the large national projects have pushed the development, and extremely high performances have been achieved. In this presentation, the history, current status and future prospects of R&D for CCs in Japan are reviewed.

Prof. Denis Le Bihan
Member of the Institut de France (Academy of Sciences) and of the Academy of Technologies
Visiting Professor, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine
Head of NeuroSpin, CEA, Saclay, France.

"Perspectives for Ultra-High Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging"
The understanding of how the human brain works has considerable potential, not only for health care (addressing the expenses of managing neurological and psychiatric patients or simply aging populations), but also for improving human cognition in general (through improved teaching methods, communication between individuals, development of human-machine interfaces, etc...). At NeuroSpin our aim is to explore the brain at spatial and temporal scales which may give access to the neural code, by pushing the current limits of brain imaging, from mouse to man, as far as possible with ultra high magnetic field (UHF) Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy. NeuroSpin is being equipped with unique MRI systems operating at very high magnetic field strengths not yet available elsewhere in the world, as well as related tools and an advanced computer platform. Our "world first" equipments include a 17.2T 250mm horizontal magnet (installed in 2010) and a 900mm 11.7T whole-body system (to be delivered in 2015). NeuroSpin is thus in good position to address either methodological developments or neuroscience and clinical applications of MRI. Results are expected to impact not only health care, but also industry, artificial intelligence, social sciences and the humanities.

Prof. Jérôme Lesueur
Phasme team, Physics and Materials Laboratory (LPEM)
ESPCI-CNRS-UPMC, Paris, France.

"High Tc superconducting electronic devices"
High Tc superconducting devices based on Josephson Junctions offer new opportunities for cryo-electronics, with possible high speed and high temperature operation. Significant improvements have been made in the recent years to develop reliable and scalable technologies to produce Josephson Junctions based circuits. I will review the most recent achievements in the field, with an emphasis on the emerging ion irradiation technology, and its applications to high frequency applications.

Dr. Rainer B. Meinke
Chief Scientist
Advanced Magnet Lab, Inc., Palm Bay, Florida, USA

"Magnetic Radiation Shielding for Space Exploration"
Radiation level in space due to solar particle events and galactic cosmic rays constitutes a major hurdle for human exploration of the solar system. Envisioned missions to near asteroids or to Mars will last for many months and the maximum allowed radiation exposure dose for astronauts could only be guaranteed with substantial radiation shielding surrounding the habitat of a spaceship. An overview of potential radiation shielding technologies will be presented with an emphasis on magnetic shielding based on ultralight expandable magnets surrounding the spaceship habitat.

Prof. Teresa Puig
Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona, CSIC
Bellaterra, Spain

"Nanocomposite Coated Conductors: towards optimal vortex pinning for high field applications"
Upon the revolution of HTS Coated Conductors (CC), Nanocomposites emerged as a smart conception to leap forward CC cost/performance to materials device integration levels. Physical and chemical growth methods undertook their remarkable developments with outstanding success. Now, EUROPE is immersed in a large cooperation program in Nanocomposite Coated Conductors. I will review its state of the start in context with the world-wide effort, with special emphasis in materials synthesis, vortex pinning and integration to high field applications.

Prof. Marina Putti
University of Genova and CNR-SPIN, Genova, Italy

"MgB2 and the Iron-based superconductors"
In the last few years new superconducting materials with intriguing properties suitable for wire developments have come on stage: MgB2 and the Iron-based superconductors. The different nature of their superconductivity, as well as the different chemistry of these materials, has implications for their range of applicability. The lecture will give an overview of the superconducting properties and of the achievements in wire production and applications.

Prof. Alexey Ustinov
Physikalisches Institut
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

"Superconducting metamaterials"
Metamaterials are artificial engineered media that enable tailored interactions with electromagnetic waves. The design flexibility of superconducting thin-film resonators and Josephson circuits allows for utilizing small structures down to the nanoscale while maintaining low loss properties, very strong and well-controlled nonlinearity, and frequency tunability in the microwave and mm-wave frequency ranges. An interesting spin-off here is going to be quantum metamaterials comprised of arrays of superconducting qubits.

Prof. Pingxiang Zhang
President of Northwest Institute for Nonferrous Metal Research
Xian, Shaanxi, China

"Status of superconducting materials and applications in China"
In this presentation, the recent progress of R&D in China on Low Tc Supercondutcors (including NbTi, Nb3Sn and Nb3Al) and High Tc Superconductors (including YBCO, BSCCO, MgB2 and iron pnictides) and the status of their applications in power grid, accelerators, medical equipment and propulsion have been reviewed.

Prof. Jonas Zmuidzinas
George W. Downs Laboratory of Physics
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA

"Kinetic Inductance Detectors for Astrophysics"
In the two-fluid model introduced by Heinz London in 1934, the current in a superconductor includes contributions from both superconducting and normal electrons, corresponding to the familiar Cooper pairs and quasiparticles of the BCS theory. The pairs are lossless but have inertia, while the normal electrons are dissipative. Thus, in a circuit, the pairs contribute an inductance - the kinetic inductance - while the normal electrons contribute resistance. Absorption of energy - e.g. photons - capable of breaking the pairs into individual quasiparticles results in changes to both the inductance and resistance. These changes may be measured with high sensitivity through use of a resonant circuit, which also introduces the possibility of frequency multiplexing. Over the past fifteen years, these simple ideas have been exploited to develop a variety of detector arrays for diverse applications in astrophysics across the spectrum, from millimeter to optical wavelengths. I will describe the basic physics, the development of the field, the current status, spin-offs, and provide examples of instruments currently being developed and deployed as well as some future applications..


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