Plasma 2006: The 5th International Symposium on the Intrinsic Josephson Effect and Plasma Oscillations in High Tc Superconductors.

Experimental and theoretical research on intrinsic Josephson junctions (IJJ's) has proved to be one of the most scientifically and technological fruitful areas of condensed matter research over the last decade. Whilst many other fields of research in high-temperature superconductivity have come and gone since their discovery almost twenty years ago, intrinsic Josephson phenomena remain widely studied throughout the world due to the wide variety of quantum and classical physics which can be studied in IJJ's. In fact in the last year there has been a resurgence of interest in this area due to controversies over both the role of heating in IJJ's and the vortex phase transition from a triangular lattice to a rectangular lattice. These controversies, coupled with the very recent observation of macroscopic quantum tunnelling in IJJ's, suggest that a conference at which the latest developments in IJJ research will be discussed, will be a timely and significant contribution to the further development of new science and applications. The intrinsic Josephson effect was first observed by Kleiner et al. in 1992 and published in two papers which have now been cited nearly 1100 times. The effect is observed in anisotropic cuprate superconductors when a transport current is passed in the c-direction / i.e. perpendicular to the cuprate double-planes. Since the coherence length in the c-direction is less than the plane separation, the planes are Josephson coupled. Hence a single crystal sample of such a superconductor acts as a series array of Josephson junctions. The number of junctions is simply given by the dimension of the crystal in the c-direction divided by the spacing of the cuprate double-planes (of order 1.5 nm). The term intrinsic here distinguishes IJJ's from junctions in which there is an artificially engineered barrier between two superconducting films. Such engineered junctions have proven difficult to fabricate using high-temperature superconductors due to the very short coherence length / in fact the same short coherence length which makes IJJ's a possibility.The discovery has stimulated a wealth of research in Europe, the Far East and (to a lesser extent) the USA which led to the creation of the biennial conference series known as Plasma , the full title being The [nth] International Symposium on the Intrinsic Josephson Effect and Plasma Oscillations in High Tc Superconductors. The first four meetings in the series were held in Sendai, Japan (twice), Pommersfelden (Germany) and Tsukuba (Japan). The fifth meeting will be hosted by University College London and held at the IEE in July 2006.