His co-organizers are: Mazhar Ali (TU Delft), Semonti Bhattacharyya (Leiden University), Nicola Paradiso (Universität Regenburg), Francesco Giazotto (CNR Nano) and Heng Wu (Tu Delft).
Remko, your workshop was on the topic of superconductivity. But what is it, actually?
Superconductors are special materials that, when cooled down to very low temperatures, lose all electrical resistance. In this state, electric currents can flow without any dissipation of energy. Fascinatingly, the reason for this behavior lies in quantum mechanics: below the critical temperature, electrons pair up and move in a collective quantum state that allows for superconductivity. So, superconductors are really a macroscopic manifestation of a quantum phenomenon, normally only observed at much smaller scales.
It sounds like a very fascinating field of Physics! Do you remember when you decided to pursue a scientific career in superconductivity?
What drew me to superconductivity in the first place was its historical connection with Leiden University, where I carried out my undergraduate studies and PhD. This phenomenon was discovered right in Leiden in 1911 by H.K. Onnes and his colleagues. This inspired me to join Jan Aarts and Kaveh Lahabi, both researchers in superconductivity, for my master project. While the historical connection brought me in, I stayed because research on superconductivity turned out to be a lot of fun. Our experiments probe structures ten times smaller than a human hair: they are invisible to the naked eye, but still observable under an electron microscope. And precisely at this scale, new and unexpected physics starts to emerge. When I am in the lab shaping these nanostructures in different ways and observing the emergence of new behavior, I feel that what I do is magical.
If I hear you talk about this, I want to go to the lab myself! What was the reason you felt it was necessary to organize a Lorentz Center workshop on this topic?
As a student in Leiden, I often walked past the Lorentz Center posters, and during my PhD I attended multiple workshops, which I really enjoyed. I was eager to organize a scientific event myself, and one of my research interests, the superconducting diode effect (a supercurrent that flows in one direction but only allows for a normal current to flow in the other direction) struck me as an excellent topic for a workshop. There is a disagreement in the community on whether this effect is caused by interesting physics, or by more trivial causes. Besides, diode effects have been observed already in the last century, but much of it is currently rediscovered. I felt it was time for the community to come together and discuss this development in the informal atmosphere that a Lorentz Workshop allows.
And then your co-organizers came into the picture.
Indeed! I reached out to Mazhar Ali, who is an expert on superconductivity and junctions. My initial plan was to have a small workshop, but Mazhar contributed a lot of new ideas, and the workshop truly began to take shape. We then invited Semonthi, Heng Wu, Nicola and Francesco. Along the way, many fresh ideas emerged, fostered also by the feedback from the advisory boards and interactions with the Lorentz Center. What surprised me was how the idea evolved: through discussions with the co-organizers, the scope expanded organically into something much broader than I had first imagined. From a workshop focused on the superconducting diode effects, we included two other hot topics in superconductivity: 2D superconductivity and gating. We decided to explore interconnectivities between these different topics, as you need all the three ingredients to produce future technologies.
What do you feel were the most important achievements of your workshop?
We produced a YouTube video showcasing the most exciting developments in superconductivity. I feel this is very important for attracting undergraduates to the field, to bring them closer to the cutting-edge topics and big open questions we want to tackle in the future. We also are in the process of writing a roadmap summarizing the workshop discussions on the overarching challenges and outstanding questions we believe should be investigated in the future. One of the things I’m most proud of as an organizer was to witness a lot of cross-pollination between researchers from the three areas brought together by the workshop. A special moment for me was seeing two professors exchanging contact details. They didn’t know each other before the workshop, but I knew both, and I sensed that by simply having them in the same room, they would exchange ideas and spark new research.
Would you organize another workshop at the Lorentz Center?
Definitely! The application process was a lot of work, but the support of the Lorentz Center made it possible even at an early stage of my career to organize such a wonderful workshop. And the financial support from the WE Heraeus Foundation made it easier for more participants to join, especially those at an early-career stage. This workshop ended up being one of the highlights of my year, and I am extremely proud of it!
