Argonne, a contract lab for the Department of Energy, annually selects on a competitive basis some 200 students from around the country to participate in its Division of Educational Programs. The research project that Michael proposed for the ten-week internship grew out of an honors research project for which he received an Honors Research Grant in the spring of 2000. While at Argonne, Michael's supervisor was Paul Zshack of the Collaborative Access Team, a team made up of scientists from the University of Illinois, the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, and UOP Research and Development. Michael's purpose in this research was to see if it is possible to raise the conductivity of a material.
Materials used for conductivity have a critical current density.
This is the maximum current that they are able to handle. Prior researchers experimented with increasing this critical density with properties such as cobalt and iron. Michael picked up with the effort to see what would happen using nickel. In trying to raise the conductivity of a material, these problems were addressed. Superconductivity material is limited to small current values.