Daniel Turner, a 3rd year Cockcroft student at Lancaster University, co-supervised by ASTeC, has won the best student poster prize at the international conference on superconducting RF (SRF’21). The conference is attended by around 400 international researchers and the student competition had around 50 entrants.
Dan’s poster described his work in developing a facility for the magnetic characterisation of Planar S-I-S Multilayer structures. SIS structures are interleaved layers of superconductors and insulators and could possibly double the gradient of SRF linacs. ASTeC and Liverpool have a program of research creating these novel structures however current magnetic field characterisation measurements cannot work with multilayers so a new facility was required. Dan has built this facility from scratch and is now measuring samples from all over the world giving insights into the operation of superconductors. Working with Oleg Malyshev in ASTeC and Tobias Junginger at the University of Victoria, Dan has branched out to measuring several different type of superconductors and the effect of different surface treatments allowing new processes to be optimised.
Prof Graeme Burt who supervises Dan said, “Dan is very deserving of this award, he has worked really hard on getting his facility operation in a short period of time allowing him to not only measure UK samples but to then start playing a major role in international research programmes such as ARIES”.