Critical Junctions

"A book about theory and method in the humanities and social sciences. It reacts to what has become known as the "cultural turn," a shift toward semiotics, discourse, and representations and away from other sorts of determinations that started in the early 1980s and that has dominated social thinking for a long string of years. The book is based in a reconsideration of the meeting of two disciplines that helped to launch the cultural turn: anthropology and history. Specifically, it criticizes the ideas of hermeneutics and "thick description" (Clifford Geertz) that have come to play a key role in the encounter of anthropology and history and then in the cultural turn. It led to the renewed cherishing of what Gupta and Ferguson have called paradigms of "peoples and places," saturated pictures of universes, both small and large, of meaning ina more of less frozen standstill-an intellectual precursor to the cultural xenophobia of our times. Against this, the present book embraces praxis and "critical junctions": the connections in space (in and out of a relations of power and dependency, and what Eric Wolf has called the "interstitial relations" between apparently separate institutional domains. In this way the book adds to the current revival of institutionally based "global ethnography," which studies "up and outward" (the journal of Ethnography is a good example)."--Preface

Critical juncture theory seeks to understand how social orders are created, become entrenched, and change. In this book, leading practitioners offer the first coordinated effort to define this field, assess its theoretical and methodological foundations, and use a critical assessment of current practices as a basis for guiding its future.

In the last decades, superconducting devices have emerged as a promising platform for quantum technologies, including quantum sensing and quantum computing. Their key elements are Josephson junctions, which allow for coherent supercurrent tunneling between two weakly linked superconductors. If such a junction is extended in one direction to a long junction, the superconducting phase difference can vary in space and time and may allow for quantized phase windings that drive supercurrent vortices.

Diese Arbeit beschreibt die Entwicklung einer Technologie für die Herstellung hochqualitativer sub-μm Nb/Al-AlOx/Nb-Josephson-Kontakte. Mit den dadurch entstandenen Bauteilen wurden verschiedene experimentell zuvor noch nicht beobachtete makroskopische Quanteneffekte nachgewiesen. Weiterhin wurden Nb-basierte Phasen-Qubits entworfen, hergestellt und gemessen, die längere Kohärenzzeiten als vergleichbare Bauelemente aus der Literatur aufweisen.

This proceedings contains the works of both experimental and theoretical aspects of high temperature superconductivity with special emphasis on the results obtained by nuclear methods (e.g. neutron scattering, μSR, positron annihilation and Mössbauer spectroscopy).

This book summarizes the history and present status and applications of Josephson junctions. These devices are leading elements in superconducting electronics and provide state-of-the-art performance in detection of small magnetic fields and currents, in several digital computing methods, and in medical diagnostic devices and now provide voltage standards used worldwide. Astronomical infrared (IR) telescopes, including the South Pole Telescope, use these junctions in combinations called superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs).

This volume will focus on the theory and experiments leading to quantitative understanding of the magnetic field and temperature dependence of critical current densities in high-temperature superconductors. Topics will include: critical currents and flux-pinning, flux flow and flux creep, anisotropy of critical fields and currents, properties of the flux lattice and the irreversibility line, magnetization, granularity. Contents:Critical Currents in Neutron Irradiated High Temperature Superconductors (H W Weber)Radiation Induced Disorder as a Unique Method for Studing Electronic States of HTSC's and Modifying Their Properties (B N Goshchitskii et al)Influence of Fast Neutron Irradiation on Various Types of HTSC Materials: Comprehensive Study (H Szymczak et al)Critical Currents and Angular Dependence in Magnetic a.c. Response: Test for Intrinsic Pinning (L Krusin-Elbaum et al)Why the Critical Current Densities of High Tc's Vary Anomalously with Temperature, Field and Time (S Senoussi et al)The Effect of the Intragranular Irreversible Magnetization on the Intergranular and Intragranular Critical Currents (S L Ginzburg et al)Bean-Livingstone Surface barrier in High Temperature Superconductors (M Konczykowski)Pinning Centers in C-Axis Oriented Bi-Sr-Ca-Cu-O Thin Films (G Jung et al)The Effect of an Electric Current on Microwave Absorption in a YBaCuO Ceramic Superconductor (J Stankowski et al)and other papers Readership: Condensed matter physicists, electronic and electrical engineers and chemists. keywords: