BCC Awards Major Prize to Dr Mark Raine

Dr Mark J. Raine, a Research Fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Durham was awarded the 2017 Harry Jones Prize by the British Cryogenics Council (BCC) for his PhD thesis work entitled: ‘High Field Superconductors for Fusion Energy Applications’.

The prize is awarded annually for research in the area of experimental applied science that contains significant use of cryogenics. Raine’s thesis work involved making the low temperature superconductor niobium carbonitride in nanocrystalline form which was discovered to have greatly improved superconducting properties over standard microcrystalline material. The thesis also provided detailed measurements, analysis and evaluation of the accuracy of a large measurement programme undertaken to verify superconducting wires for use in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the fusion energy tokamak, currently being built in Cadarache, France. The BCC citation said that Raine’s thesis is an “excellent piece of work and well-deserving of the prize.”