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Professor Jan Evetts in memoriam

It is with great sadness that we report the death of Jan Evetts, who lost his second battle with cancer on 18 August 2005. In 1988 he was appointed Founding Editor of this journal where his leadership created the foundation upon which its success rests today. He made an outstanding series of contributions to the science of superconductivity and to the understanding of superconducting materials, and was an indefatigable champion of the development of applications of superconductivity. The loss to the scientific community is incalculable, as is attested by the many communications received from colleagues throughout the world. Professor Jan Edgar Evetts (1939–2005) Jan was born on 31 March 1939, and attended the Dragon School in Oxford, and later Haileybury. He was awarded an exhibition to read Natural Sciences at Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1958 and took his BA degree in 1961. He then undertook a Certificate of Postgraduate Study in Physics under the supervision of Professor Neville Mott. He was the first student to undertake this newly-instituted course; the title of his thesis was `The Resistance of Transition Metals'. In 1962 he joined David Dew-Hughes' embryonic superconducting materials research group, along with Archie Campbell and Anant Narlikar. In fact it was Jan's enthusiasm for the proposed course of research that helped convince David that he should follow Professor Alan Cottrell's suggestion to apply metallurgical methodology to the study of the factors that controlled critical current density in the type II superconductors that were then under development for applications in magnets. Competing theories for the critical current density at that time were fine filaments or `Mendelssohn Sponge' versus the pinning of Abrikosov quantized vortices. The results of the group's work, to which Jan made a major contribution, came down heavily in favour of the latter theory. Jan's outstanding characteristic was his meticulous and painstaking approach to every piece of work that he tackled. His attention to detail, and his ability to design elegant experiments, was unique. He was awarded a PhD for his thesis `The Magnetisation of Superconducting Lead Alloys'. The work on flux pinning culminated in the publication of `Critical Currents in Superconductors', a research monograph (co-authored with Archie Campbell) that rapidly became the standard reference work in the field. It has recently been reprinted in the Advances in Physics `Classic Articles' series as the 9th most cited article in the journal's history (2001 Adv. Phys. 50 1249–449). Jan was appointed to a research fellowship at Pembroke College and to a Science Research Council Research Fellowship in the Department of Metallurgy in 1965. After David Dew-Hughes left Cambridge, Jan inherited the superconducting materials research group and was appointed University Demonstrator in Metallurgy and a full Fellow in Pembroke College in 1966. He progressed steadily through the various levels of academic rank, finally being appointed Professor of Device Materials in 1998. Employing an astonishing combination of administrative skill, long term planning, manipulation of the University system and high quality research at the top international level, Jan built up the largest superconductivity group in the UK, comprising some 40 members. Five of his group obtained permanent positions in the Metallurgy Department, and there are many scientists all over the world, as well as many in Cambridge, who owe their careers to him. Jan served on many UK and European Committees, and in the organization of several international conferences. The major event of the 1980s was undoubtedly the discovery of high temperature superconductivity. Jan's group was well placed to move very rapidly into this area and the paper submitted to Nature in March 1987 was the first in the literature to report the deposition of a thin ceramic film with a 90 K superconducting transition temperature. During 1987 Jan helped co-ordinate the successful Cambridge University application to the EPSRC for an IRC in Superconductivity and he became Co-Director in charge of both the processing and the thin film and device research areas. During this very fruitful period of research a large number of basic and applied discoveries were made and some two dozen patents were filed. A novel processing method for producing textured ceramic superconductors has been successfully transferred to industry. Jan's work on superconductivity was always paralleled by research on magnetic materials; the cross fertilization between disciplines has been very fruitful and led to him editing Pergamon's `Concise Encyclopedia of Magnetic and Superconducting Materials' in 1992. This work has been a major success with a world-wide readership. In spite of his heavy administrative responsibilities he was always most happy when discussing the details of new research. The papers that came from his group included his name, not because he was the leader, but because in most cases the original ideas and much of the detail came from him. In his most fundamental paper he showed how Maxwell's equations should be adapted to describe magnetic fields in superconductors. This prompted a reply from Brian Josephson, and these two papers were the first to put Maxwell's equations in superconductors on a firm basis. Jan's very elegant and physical treatment in terms of the energy of vortices was the only one to be applicable to hysteretic superconductors. Later his work became more materials-based and expanded into areas beyond superconductivity, such as magnetism. His group built up an enormous expertise in the production of thin films, which allowed them to do very elegant experiments as well as develop important practical technologies. A topic from his graduate days, to which he would return from time to time, was that of force free configurations of flux lines and their breakdown as vortices cross each other. He was recently awarded, in collaboration with Mark Blamire, an EPSRC grant to return to this work and was looking forward to doing some fundamental research. It would be a fitting memorial if this work produces the answer to a forty-year-old problem. He leaves a great gap and will be missed by the entire superconductivity community.