The Institute for Materials Research is thrilled to announce Robert J. Cava, Russell Wellman Moore Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, will present at the upcoming installment of its Distinguished Lecture Series.
Cava’s lecture, “Superconductivity: Where we are and where we are going,” will be held Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2018, at 1 p.m. at 1080 Physics Research Building (Smith Seminar Room).
All students and faculty are welcome to attend. Attendees are invited to join us for refreshments and appetizers following the talk.
Lecture Abstract
The discovery of superconductivity, the transmission of electrical current with zero energy loss, recently passed its 100th anniversary. This truly remarkable property of matter, found at cryogenic temperatures, has made its way into a variety of important uses in modern society, but nature has not yet given us the ultimate practical material that will change the world through its lossless transmission of electrical energy over long distances. Research on this complex problem in materials science persists in the world at many levels, and progress is continuously made on both scientific and practical fronts, in spite of the impatience that is often displayed by both the scientific and lay public, who typically prefer immediate rather than delayed gratification. In this talk I will briefly describe where we are in this field, and how we got here, and describe the vision that some have had for where we should be going. Because my personal research is in the discovery of new superconducting materials, only one facet among the larger set of fundamental and practical issues currently under study, the talk will be given from that perspective.
Speaker Bio
Robert Cava is the Russell Wellman Moore Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, where he is the former Chair of the Chemistry Department and former Director of the Materials Institute. His research in new materials emphasizes the relationships between chemistry, crystal structure, and electronic and magnetic properties. He received his Ph.D. in Ceramics from MIT in 1978, after which he was an NRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Solid State Chemistry at NIST. He began at Princeton in 1997 after working at Bell Labs for 17 years, where he was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Ceramic Society, and the Neutron Scattering Society of America, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Member of The Royal Society of London. He has been the recipient of awards from the APS, the ACS, and the MRS, and has more than 60,000 citations.