As part of the international conference Advances in Solid Physics and New Materials, organised by the Institute of Physics Belgrade and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, American physicist Peter Hirschfield, PhD, delivered a lecture on Wednesday, 21 May 2025. The lecture on the history of superconductivity research was titled Superconductivity: There’s Plenty of Cream at the Bottom.
The conference took place in the period between 19 and 23 May 2025 at the premises of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. It was dedicated to recent breakthroughs and findings in the field of solid-state physics and new materials. It was organised to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the Centre for the Solid State Physics and New Materials at the Institute of Physics Belgrade.
The conference welcomed numerous scholars from across the globe, including Dr Hirschfield.
He is a professor at the University of Florida, where his research focuses on superconductivity and quantum materials, with a particular emphasis on new challenges arising from the discovery of high-temperature iron-based superconductors. He earned his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from Princeton University, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the Technical University of Munich and Stanford University. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2004, and in 2002 received the John Bardeen Prize, awarded for theoretical work that has provided significant insights into the nature of superconductivity.
The development of superconductivity research commenced with the landmark discovery made by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. Since then, the search for materials that conduct electricity without resistance, as well as theoretical explanations of this phenomenon, has marked solid-state physics and materials science throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. At the Centre for Solid State Physics and New Materials of the Institute of Physics Belgrade, founded by Academician Zoran V. Popović, numerous researchers are actively engaged in this field of research.