James Edward Zimmerman

James "Jim" Edward Zimmerman ( born February 19, 1923 in Lantry, South Dakota; † August 4, 1999 in Boulder) is an American physicist, known as the inventor of the SQUID.

Zimmerman grew up as the son of a farmer on a ranch in South Dakota. He made 1943 his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, was then involved in the Westinghouse Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh in the development of radar technology and went in this context during the Second World War to Sydney. After the war he continued his studies in Pittsburgh and in 1951 received his doctorate at Immanuel Estermann at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Physics ( on low temperature physics ). Then he conducted research there for two years. 1951 to 1953 he was at the Smithsonian Institution, where he measured the solar constant at observatories in California and Chile. After that he was. At the research laboratories of the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan There he dealt again with low temperature physics. Early 1960s, it came with the discovery of the Josephson effect (and its demonstration by John Rowell at Bell Laboratories in 1963 ) to dramatic upheavals in the local research. James Mercereau built in 1964, Arnold Silver, Robert Jaklevic and John Lambe at Ford a quantum interferometer with two Josephson compounds, which then simplified Zimmerman.

1965 Silver and Zimmerman then developed the first SQUID magnetometers and Amplifier (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, the name comes from him ), who only had a Josephson junction. After that, he devoted much of his research career, the further development of this measuring instrument, only when Ford and then from 1970 at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS, now NIST) in Boulder, where he ( the improved sensitivity for fields in the environment ) the SQUID gradiometer and the fractional turn SQUID introduced ( the improved coupling ). He turned the SQUID in geophysics, to the bio-magnetism, medicine, and in metrology. He was part of the team, the (1969 in an experiment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by David Cohen and Edgar Edelsak ) and the first magnetoencephalogram of Acoustically evoked potentials recorded the first magnetocardiogram (1976).

To make the application of SQUIDs outside the laboratory practical ( for the operation are low temperatures necessary), he developed Stirling engine cooling. It demonstrated 1977 ( Ray Radebaugh ) a SQUID which was cooled by a Stirling engine, mainly made ​​of plastic 8.5 Kelvin. The use of plastic avoiding magnetic disturbance of the SQUID magnetometer.

In 1987 he was one of the first who established a SQUID with the then newly discovered high-temperature superconductors.

For educational purposes, he developed sophisticated pendulum models to demonstrate the SQUID dynamics.

In 1985 he went with the NBS ( NIST) in retirement. He was a Fellow of NIST and received their highest award, the Samuel Wesley Stratton Award. He received the Humboldt Research Award.

In 1969 he was one of the founders of the (later BTI), which marketed the first SQUID SHE Corporation commercially available.