Education and career
Deaver received his undergraduate B.S. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952, and his masters at Washington University in St. Louis in 1954.
Between 1954 and 1957, he was a physicist and commissioned a lieutenant in the United States Air Force at the Air Force Special Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. Deaver began his career as a professor at the University of Virginia in 1965, having completed in 1962 his PhD at Stanford University, under the supervision of William M. Fairbank, with thesis Experimental evidence for quantized magnetic flux in superconducting cylinders. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow between 1966 and 1968. [3]
Deaver has received a number of awards at the university, including the Alumni Association's Distinguished Professor Award for teaching in 2004. [4] He is a member of the American Physical Society, the Virginia Academy of Science, the Raven Society, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Pi Sigma, and Omicron Delta Kappa. In 2000 he received the George B. Pegram Award, for "Excellence in the Teaching of Physics in the Southeast", from the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society. [5]
In 2008 the physics department announced the establishment of the Bascom S. Deaver Scholarship Fund, the first undergraduate scholarship program in physics at UVA, "in recognition of Prof. Deaver's great impact on [the UVA physics] program." [6]
Deaver retired from academia in summer 2010, after 45 years at UVA. [7]
Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic fields are expelled from the material. Any material exhibiting these properties is a superconductor. Unlike an ordinary metallic conductor, whose resistance decreases gradually as its temperature is lowered, even down to near absolute zero, a superconductor has a characteristic critical temperature below which the resistance drops abruptly to zero. An electric current through a loop of superconducting wire can persist indefinitely with no power source.
A SQUID is a very sensitive magnetometer used to measure extremely weak magnetic fields, based on superconducting loops containing Josephson junctions.
The Aharonov–Bohm effect, sometimes called the Ehrenberg–Siday–Aharonov–Bohm effect, is a quantum-mechanical phenomenon in which an electrically charged particle is affected by an electromagnetic potential, despite being confined to a region in which both the magnetic field and electric field are zero. The underlying mechanism is the coupling of the electromagnetic potential with the complex phase of a charged particle's wave function, and the Aharonov–Bohm effect is accordingly illustrated by interference experiments.
The magnetic flux, represented by the symbol Φ, threading some contour or loop is defined as the magnetic field B multiplied by the loop area S, i.e. Φ = B ⋅ S. Both B and S can be arbitrary, meaning that the flux Φ can be as well but increments of flux can be quantized. The wave function can be multivalued as it happens in the Aharonov–Bohm effect or quantized as in superconductors. The unit of quantization is therefore called magnetic flux quantum.
Fritz Wolfgang London was a German born physicist and professor at Duke University. His fundamental contributions to the theories of chemical bonding and of intermolecular forces are today considered classic and are discussed in standard textbooks of physical chemistry. With his brother Heinz London, he made a significant contribution to understanding electromagnetic properties of superconductors with the London equations and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on five separate occasions.
The Little–Parks effect was discovered in 1962 by William A. Little and Ronald D. Parks in experiments with empty and thin-walled superconducting cylinders subjected to a parallel magnetic field. It was one of the first experiments to indicate the importance of Cooper-pairing principle in BCS theory.
Sir Richard Henry Friend is a British physicist who was the Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge from 1995 until 2020 and is Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore. Friend's research concerns the physics and engineering of carbon-based semiconductors. He also serves as Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore.
Nina Byers was a theoretical physicist, research professor and professor of physics emeritus in the department of physics and astronomy, UCLA, and Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.
Superconducting quantum computing is a branch of solid state quantum computing that implements superconducting electronic circuits using superconducting qubits as artificial atoms, or quantum dots. For superconducting qubits, the two logic states are the ground state and the excited state, denoted respectively. Research in superconducting quantum computing is conducted by companies such as Google, IBM, IMEC, BBN Technologies, Rigetti, and Intel. Many recently developed QPUs use superconducting architecture.
Lev Pavlovich Rapoport was well known for his pioneering works in nuclear and atomic theoretical physics.
In quantum computing, more specifically in superconducting quantum computing, flux qubits are micrometer sized loops of superconducting metal that is interrupted by a number of Josephson junctions. These devices function as quantum bits. The flux qubit was first proposed by Terry P. Orlando et al. at MIT in 1999 and fabricated shortly thereafter. During fabrication, the Josephson junction parameters are engineered so that a persistent current will flow continuously when an external magnetic flux is applied. Only an integer number of flux quanta are allowed to penetrate the superconducting ring, resulting in clockwise or counter-clockwise mesoscopic supercurrents in the loop to compensate a non-integer external flux bias. When the applied flux through the loop area is close to a half integer number of flux quanta, the two lowest energy eigenstates of the loop will be a quantum superposition of the clockwise and counter-clockwise currents. The two lowest energy eigenstates differ only by the relative quantum phase between the composing current-direction states. Higher energy eigenstates correspond to much larger (macroscopic) persistent currents, that induce an additional flux quantum to the qubit loop, thus are well separated energetically from the lowest two eigenstates. This separation, known as the "qubit non linearity" criteria, allows operations with the two lowest eigenstates only, effectively creating a two level system. Usually, the two lowest eigenstates will serve as the computational basis for the logical qubit.
Sir Alfred Brian Pippard, FRS, was a British physicist. He was Cavendish Professor of Physics from 1971 until 1982 and an Honorary Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, of which he was the first President.
A quantum bus is a device which can be used to store or transfer information between independent qubits in a quantum computer, or combine two qubits into a superposition. It is the quantum analog of a classical bus.
Gilbert J. "Gilly" Sullivan was the longtime director of the University of Virginia Alumni Association for 35 years. Appointed to the position in 1958 after the retirement of J. Malcolm "Mack" Luck, Sullivan remained in the position until his retirement in 1993. During his years at the Alumni Association, he helped develop the Virginia Student Aid Foundation and significant expansion of the Jefferson Scholarship Program.
William Martin Fairbank was an American physicist known in particular for his work on liquid helium.
Macroscopic quantum phenomena are processes showing quantum behavior at the macroscopic scale, rather than at the atomic scale where quantum effects are prevalent. The best-known examples of macroscopic quantum phenomena are superfluidity and superconductivity; other examples include the quantum Hall effect, Josephson effect and topological order. Since 2000 there has been extensive experimental work on quantum gases, particularly Bose–Einstein condensates.
Yasunobu Nakamura (中村 泰信 Nakamura Yasunobu) is a Japanese physicist. He is a professor at the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST) and the Principal Investigator of the Superconducting Quantum Electronics Research Group (SQERG) at the Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) within RIKEN. He has contributed primarily to the area of quantum information science, particularly in superconducting quantum computing and hybrid quantum systems.
Katherine E. Aidala is an American physicist. She is a professor of physics at Mount Holyoke College and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She studies the fundamental properties of materials and devices, providing insight that could lead to technological innovation.
Henry "Hank" Gabriel Blosser was an American nuclear physicist, known as a director for designing and building superconducting cyclotrons.
Kazumi Maki was a Japanese theoretical physicist, known for his research in "superconductivity, superfluid ³He, and quasi‑one‑dimensional (1D) materials."
