Gregory S. Boebinger
Florida State University
|
Primary Section: 33, Applied Physical Sciences Secondary Section: 13, Physics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2021)
|
Biosketch
Greg Boebinger is a condensed matter physicist recognized for his research involving high magnetic fields. Boebinger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. He graduated from Purdue University in 1981 with undergraduate degrees in physics, electrical engineering, and philosophy. After a year as a Churchill Fellow at Cambridge University, he began working toward his Ph.D. at MIT, which he received in 1986 for experiments performed at the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory on the fractional quantum Hall effect. After a year as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, Boebinger accepted a position at Bell Laboratories, where he established his own pulsed magnet laboratory and began his research on high temperature superconductivity. In 1998, Boebinger moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to become director of the pulsed magnet laboratory of the new National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab), founded in 1990 as a partnership among Florida State University (FSU), the University of Florida (UF), and LANL. In 2004, Boebinger became director of the MagLab, moving to its FSU headquarters and accepting appointments as Professor of Physics from both FSU and UF. Greg Boebinger is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Research Interests
Greg Boebinger’s personal research is focused on the utilization of high magnetic fields to study correlated electron states. He is best known for his work on high temperature superconductivity, in which high magnetic fields are used to suppress the superconducting state to reveal the unusual phenomenology of the physical state that underlies – and presumably gives rise to – high temperature superconductivity. He and his colleagues have studied both the copper- and iron-based superconductors, performing measurements under high magnetic fields that include electrical resistivity, Hall effect, and specific heat. In the course of these experiments, they have discovered a number of phenomena that appear to be linked to the same carrier density that is optimal for providing the most robust superconductivity when the magnetic field is removed. Boebinger has also used high magnetic fields to induce and study correlated electron states that do not exist except in magnetic fields, including the integer and fractional quantum Hall states. The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab), which Boebinger has directed since (April 1) 2004, is the largest and most powerful high-magnetic-field laboratory in the world, hosting 2000 scientists annually to perform experiments that span condensed matter physics, materials science, magnet engineering, chemistry, biochemistry, and biomedicine.
