Editor’s Overview of Issue 3

We present to our readers the third Issue of this News Forum and are happy to note that the Forum readership is increasing steadily, judging by the number of visits to our website and other statistical information available to us.  We wish to thank all authors and those of you who sent us comments on and evaluations of the Forum, together with recommendations for future improvements.  Such comments are very much appreciated and represent a feedback essential for the continuing development of the Forum. 

The Regional News section (RN) features an article by H. Uhlmann and Th. Ortlepp, who describe the goals, activities and plans of the non-profit FLUXONICS Society, a European association dedicated to the furthering of education, information exchange, coordination of R&D efforts and forecasting in the area of superconducting digital electronics.  This field of activity received most recently a significant boost by the approval of the EC-supported European project “S-Pulse” (see Announcement A24), launched in early January 2008.   We hope that in the fall of 2008 we will be able to present to our readers a critical review based on the assessment of the status of digital electronics in Europe.  Such an assessment is planned at the inception of the “S-Pulse” project.

The present issue features one critical review (CR) by P. Tixador, who presents the status and perspectives of superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) systems.  The author is personally involved in the development of a high-Tc SMES for intermittent power storage and supply, to our knowledge the only currently active SMES program in Western Europe.

The Science and Technology News section (ST) contains a preview of selected contributed papers submitted to Proceedings of EUCAS 2007.  These Proceedings will eventually appear in the online edition of the Journal of Physics Conference Series (JPCS) published by the Institute of Physics (IOP, UK).  Of the numerous papers submitted by European authors for electronic pre-publication in the Forum (with consent of IOP), we could select only a fraction.  The selection of papers was based on the following criteria: (i) absence of errors, (ii) timeliness, (iii) importance of results to the superconductivity community, (iv) completeness of the presented work (preliminary studies were as a rule declined), (v) satisfactory English language.  Of course, any such selection is somewhat arbitrary, although in cases of doubt an external review was performed.  We thank authors of all papers submitted for selection.

The present issue contains that part of selected EUCAS 2007 papers, which did not require any major re-working.  The second and last installment of selected EUCAS papers will appear in the next Issue of the Forum (No. 4) scheduled for April 2008.  Several of papers published in the present and coming Issue might differ from the Proceedings (JPCS) version.  Any such differences are caused by Forum’s editorial requests, entirely independent of demands imposed by reviewers of Proceedings.  European authors, who did not submit their EUCAS contributions for selection by the News Forum, are still encouraged to do that before March 15, 2008.  Much earlier submissions will be most helpful in preventing possible delays in reviewing and selection.  Non-European authors, who feel strongly that their work is of special interest or importance to the European superconductivity community, may also submit.

New features of the Forum, introduced recently, include the “search” function, and the listing of European conferences and workshops of interest.  For convenience of our authors, we plan to implement a recommended Microsoft WORD template for texts appearing in the PDF format (sections CR, RN and ST).   The template will be available shortly after the publication of this Issue.

The frequently updated Announcements and Highlights complete this Issue.