Site:           University of Tokyo 
                Department of Superconductivity
                Hongo, 7-3-1 Bunkyoku
                Tokyo 113, Japan
                http://www.appchem.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/labs/kitazawa/superconductivity/index.html
Date Visited:   7 June 1996
WTEC Attendees: D. Larbalestier (report author), 
                D. Gubser, 
                M. Suenaga, 
                J. Willis
Hosts:          Prof. Koichi Kitazawa, 
                   Department of Applied Chemistry and 
                   Department of Superconductivity

BACKGROUND

Professor Kitazawa's group has played a vital role in the development of HTS right from the beginning of HTS studies in 1986. It was the first group to identify the 214 phase responsible for superconductivity in Bednorz and Mueller's mixed-phase samples, presenting its seminal results at the crucial Materials Research Society Meeting in December 1986 at which the discovery first became widely known. Several professors at Tokyo University collaborated to make important early strides and became influential in setting the stage for much of the early scientific work in HTS in Japan. As the field has matured, the effort at Tokyo University has continued to strengthen and to remain influential; important efforts by Prof. Kitazawa, Prof. Kishio, and Prof. Yamafuji (now retired) have kept the effort in the forefront worldwide. There is now a Department of Superconductivity at Tokyo University, and Prof. Kitazawa is Professor in both this department and the Department of Applied Chemistry. He is the senior person in the field at Tokyo University and enjoys high regard in the field throughout the world. The WTEC team visited him on the last day of its trip to Japan, hoping to synthesize various impressions from our trip. We received a number of important insights from our discussions there.

SUPERCONDUCTIVITY IN JAPAN

Our conversation covered the past and the future. An overall theme was that there is a strong belief in Japan that superconductivity will be a vital technology of the 21st century. This belief motivates the Japanese approach to the subject, which is perhaps more patient than the U.S. view. Japanese scientists and companies have been very active in superconductivity for more than 25 years, and the discoveries of HTS, in which Japan played an important role, have only served to confirm their interest. For example the Super-GM program (see also the site report on this national project) was approved at least in part because of the HTS discoveries. The combination of LTS device development (generator) and HTS materials development looks perhaps disconnected in the short term but very logical in the context of a 21st century approach to the technology.

RECENT CHANGES IN THE FUNDING OF RESEARCH IN JAPANESE UNIVERSITIES

There have been many recent changes to the Japanese budget process and to the way that universities are funded. Among the important new trends is that the government has explicitly determined to fund science and technology (S&T), rather than just large projects involving S&T, because in the past large projects often have had the bulk of their money spent on land acquisition and construction. As part of the government economy priming to help Japan recover from the recent recession, MITI and STA have explicitly targeted money to universities. Prof. Kitazawa had been on a panel that had evaluated about 2,000 applications for these awards by MITI/NEDO. About 100 awards of about 1 million dollars each were made, seven of which were in the general area of superconductivity. This scheme was at first only for one year, but a second-year award in fiscal year 1996 of about $50 million brought the total amount given out to $150 million.

STA also introduced a similar scheme, improved, however, in that the money and time scale were increased to a total of $100 million available for selected projects each year for five years. Prof. Kitazawa won one of these awards and used it to help Dr. Tonomura of Hitachi Research Laboratory complete the funding of a 1 MeV electron holography microscope. This project needed about $30 million for total funding; Prof. Kitazawa's $10 million represented the external match required by Hitachi. This project is a highly successful continuation of an existing program that was funded by ERATO.

GENERAL COMMENTS ABOUT THE FUNDING OF UNIVERSITY RESEARCH

Professors Kitazawa and Kishio have very well equipped labs with relatively stable teams of about 15 graduate students each. To run such labs, they estimated that they required about $300 thousand per year; in contrast to U.S. or European labs, they do not pay their graduate students, and this money is therefore solely for operating expenses. It is provided by a combination of grants from the Ministry of Education (Monbusho) and industry. The Monbusho university budget for all scientific research comes to about $1 billion per year. There are about 150,000 researchers in Japanese universities, who together make about 70,000 applications a year, of which about 20,000 are successful. The typical grant is about $50 thousand per year.

Additional new funding for universities is coming from JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) in the amount of $100 million, the money being distributed to about 500 professors. The goal of this new program is to raise the level of funding for some outstanding groups, bringing their funding level closer to that of leading U.S. and European groups.

Like the U.S. industry, Japanese industry is often not very concerned about university research, but a program of the JST (Japan Science & Technology Corporation, funded by the STA²) can fund industry to exploit patents that are obtained by Japanese universities. For example, Sumitomo Electric Company benefited in the amount of about $10 million from STA on the basis of patents filed by Tokyo University and NRIM on HTS materials. In spite of this, the motivation for the work at Tokyo University remains focused on scientific discovery. This theme appears to motivate a lot of the work in Japan. It appears that the large MITI program in HTS will continue for another ten years because HTS is still seen to be precompetitive, in spite of its very large application potential.

MISCELLANEOUS TRENDS

In a wide ranging closure to the WTEC team's discussions with Prof. Kitazawa, a variety of themes emerged. One aspect of Prof. Kitazawa's approach to HTS is to broaden the potential applications of superconductivity. He showed the team a horizontal bore (warm bore 5 cm) refrigerated "dry" magnet made by Toshiba. This had been operating in his labs for over a year and was so convenient that students much preferred using it over transferring liquid helium into more capable "wet" magnets. A separate fund of $10 million was being used to purchase magnets for several other research institutions. The general goal of this aspect of Prof. Kitazawa's work was to study the influence of strong magnetic fields on common phenomena, for example corrosion. Some of the magnets would be sent to other university groups with interests outside superconductivity, but the largest component of this venture involved making magnets for a foundry institute in Saitama Prefecture, where there was an interest in new technology, and one of the possible areas of study involved fluidity control using strong fields.³

² Formerly known as Japan Research and Development Corporation (JRDC). JRDC and the Japan Information Center for Science and Technology (JICST) were combined into JST in October 1996.

³ See WTEC Panel Report on Advanced Casting Technologies in Japan and Europe (1997) for further details on Japanese R&D in use of magnetics in the foundry industry.