Superconducting technology is indispensable for solving today’s global issues, such as reducing green house gases, and increasing the energy supply. A quarter century has passed since the discovery of high temperature superconducting materials, and a variety of real-sized superconducting apparatus have been developed. Among them, a number of devices are in daily operation. In this paper, current leads, which enabled the discovery of the Higgs boson, power cables, which can contribute to the realization of highly efficient electricity transmission, high field magnets, which are employed in factories, and motors, which are opening the future of transportation technology, will all be introduced.

Here, I describe a new trend in superconductor digital circuits, which are being developed for high-end devices used in low-energy information networks. Recently, high energy efficiency has even been required for SFQ(single flux quantum) circuits. Several new SFQ circuits have been proposed, and their power consumptions were reduced to about one-tenth that of the previous SFQ circuit. New cryogenic memories have also been proposed. These memories are based on superconductor-ferromagnetic material-superconductor trilayer Josephson junctions. Critical currents depend on the direction of magnetization in the ferromagnetic materials. The small size of a memory cell is the most attractive feature compared to previous SFQ-based memories.

Wind power generation facilities have been installed across the world as a renewable energy source and the power capacity of a single wind turbine generator has been increasing. It is expected that superconducting technologies can be applied to the class of generators that is over 10 MW. This article reports on the fundamental structures and system configurations of large-scale wind turbine generators, and the design issues of large superconducting machines, while paying attention to the reduction of the superconducting wire length, and the generator size and weight. Some design results for 10 MW wind turbine generators are shown; a conventional permanent-magnet type, superconducting field coil types with salient poles and non-salient poles, and a fully superconducting type.

Due to the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, a large amount of radioactive material was released into the area around the power plant. In particular, cesium-137, which has a half-life of about 30 years, has been the main source of the damage caused by the radioactive material. Because of the large amount of soil contamination caused by the accident, there is a strong demand for techniques to reduce the volume of contaminated soil and for decontamination. As a promising technique for solving these problems, a new soil volume reduction method using a superconducting magnet was examined. In the proposed method, after classifying the stripped topsoil, magnetic separation is carried out on silt-clay. The clay minerals that are separated magnetically are then stored and controlled as cesium-containing material. This suggested technique was shown to be possible experimentally.

In this paper, I present the current status of High Temperature Superconductor Induction/Synchronous Motor (HTS-ISM) development, which concentrates on the view of the relationship between superconducting phenomena and motor performance. In particular, an intelligent motor can be realized by the use of not only the zero resistance phenomenon but also the nonlinear current transport property in the superconducting state. Furthermore, the research and development status of the HTS-ISM for transportation equipment, such as electric vehicles, is presented and discussed.

JOGMEC just completed the SQUITEM3, a practical TEM data acquisition system using high-temperature superconducting SQUID which is one of the most sensitive magnetic sensors with wide bandwidth, in order to increase the investigation depth of TEM in metal exploration. SQUITEM1 was applied to JOGMEC zinc exploration in Australia, and demonstrated the successful delineation of the deeper conductor related to sulfide metals, although the conventional coil system could not detect it. In the field trial of SQUITEM3, the latest version of SQUITEM, over the copper mineralization in Australia, it was verified that the investigation depth of SQUITEM3 was larger than SQUITEM2.

Transparent and conductive oxide (TCO) thin films are used in practice, for various application fields; in particular, the market for transparent electrodes used in touch panels, flat panel displays or lamps and thin-film solar cells has expanded recently. TCO thin-film materials such as impurity-doped ZnO, In₂0₃ and Sn0₂ as well as multicomponent oxides composed of combinations of these binary compounds are the best candidates for practical use as transparent electrodes. The carrier transport and optical properties in polycrystalline TCO thin films with a carrier concentration on the order of 10²⁰ to 10²¹ cm^-3, i.e., degenerated n-type semiconductors, are explained by combining experimental results with theoretical analyses.