James Zimmerman
James "Jim" Edward Zimmerman (born February 19, 1923 in Lantry , South Dakota , † August 4, 1999 in Boulder ) was an American physicist with significant work in the further development of the SQUID (rf-SQUID) and its application.
Zimmerman grew up as the son of a farmer on a ranch in South Dakota. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 1943 , was then involved in the development of radar technology at Westinghouse Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh and in this context went to Sydney during World War II. After the war he continued his studies in Pittsburgh and received his doctorate in physics (on low-temperature physics) under Immanuel Estermann at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1951 . He then did research there for another two years. 1951 to 1953 he was at the Smithsonian Institution, where he measured the solar constant at observatories in California and Chile. He then worked at the Ford Motor Company's research laboratories in Dearborn , Michigan . There he dealt again with low temperature physics. In the early 1960s, the discovery of the Josephson Effect (and its demonstration by John Rowell at Bell Laboratories in 1963) brought about dramatic upheavals in research there. In 1964, James Mercereau, Arnold Silver, Robert Jaklevic and John Lambe built a quantum interferometer with 2 Josephson connections at Ford, which Zimmerman then simplified.
In 1965 Silver and Zimmerman developed the first SQUID magnetometer and amplifier (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, the name also comes from him), which only had one Josephson contact. He then devoted a large part of his research career to the further development of this measuring instrument, first at Ford and then from 1970 at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS, now NIST) in Boulder, where he used the SQUID gradiometer (which improved the sensitivity for fields in the environment) and that introduced fractional turn SQUID (which improved coupling). He applied the SQUID in geophysics, biomagnetism, medicine and metrology. He was part of the team that recorded the first magnetocardiogram (in an experiment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by David Cohen and Edgar Edelsak in 1969) and the first magnetoencephalogram of acoustic evoked potentials (1976).
In order to make the use of SQUIDs outside the laboratory more practicable (low temperatures are necessary for operation), he developed Stirling engine cooling. In 1977 he demonstrated (with Ray Radebaugh) a SQUID that was cooled to 8.5 Kelvin with a Stirling engine, mainly made of plastic. The use of plastic avoided magnetic field interference in the SQUID magnetometers.
In 1987 he was one of the first to manufacture a SQUID with the then newly discovered high-temperature superconductors .
For educational purposes he developed sophisticated pendulum models to demonstrate the SQUID dynamics.
In 1985 he retired from the NBS (NIST). He was a Fellow of NIST and received its highest honor, the Samuel Wesley Stratton Award. He received the Humboldt Research Award .
In 1969 he was one of the founders of SHE Corporation (later BTI), which marketed the first commercially available SQUID.
literature
- RL Kautz Jim Zimmerman and the SQUID , IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity, March 2000, 1026-1031, abstract
- Richard L. Kautz, Donald B. Sullivan: James Edward Zimmerman . In: Physics Today . tape 53 , no. 7 , July 2000, p. 70 , doi : 10.1063 / 1.1292491 ( scitation.org [PDF]).
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Zimmerman, James |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Zimmerman, James Edward (full name); Zimmerman, Jim Edward |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 19, 1923 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lantry , South Dakota |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 4, 1999 |
| Place of death | Boulder |