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Record-Setting 100+ T Magnetic Field Achieved At Los Alamos
New submitter schrodingersGato writes "Researchers at the Los Alamos campus of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory achieved a record-setting 100.75 Tesla magnetic field. To do this, scientists placed a resistive magnet (a sophisticated electromagnet) coupled to massive bank of capacitors within another magnet fixed at a 'lower' magnetic field. A short-lived pulse two million times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field was generated. The magnet itself made an eerie sound as it was energized (video). Prepare for the birth of Magneto!"
How much stronger would a field have to be to protect a hypothetical ship the size of the space shuttle from solar winds and other non-EM ionizing radiation in interplanetary space?
If 100 tesla is achievable now, then I can imagine it wouldn't take long before a field can be generated which would be powerful enough to provide a buffer against most ionizing radiation a la Earth's own magnetic field, but I could be way in the realm of science fiction with this thought.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
This would make an excellent MRI If it doesn't rip all the blood from your body.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
>> A short-lived pulse two million times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field was generated.
In unrelated news, government researchers have issued an RFP for 100 new disk drives and data recovery services.
There ain't no SI unit named after Edison. beeeotch!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Great so how long till we can generate the magnetic feild large enough for the warp drive?
the change in my pocket move.
Because they should have sent a poet.
What insights will we gain from this breakthrough? As it stands it sounds as impressive as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Cool, but sort of useless.
Why did they choose 100 Tesla as a target? Why not 117 Tesla? That is even more!
Yes, but what will it do to a marshmallow peep?
Forget that A+ test, I bet this thing will hold your dissertation on the fridge!
How much stronger would a field have to be to protect a hypothetical ship the size of the space shuttle from solar winds
The deflection of charged particles in a magnetic field is roughly proportional to the strength of the field and the "thickness" of the field i.e. the distance that the charged particle travels through it. So (ignoring important complexities like varying field strength, ship geomtery etc.) a 100T field 1 m around the craft would be roughly as effective as a 1T field extending 100m around the craft.
Ah! So *that's* where my keys went!
W
All your ferromagnetic objects are belong to us!
I, for one, welcome our magnetic overlords.
Like this one but much more so.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Who knew you could have so much fun with magnets, as a government employee, before you happen to die from a heart attack before retirement. That is the best PR geek celebration I have ever seen!
Wow! Imagine a Beowulf cluster of....wait that makes no sense, nevermind.
This is a record for an artificial field. The strongest naturally occurring fields are believed to be about 10^12 Tesla for some pulsars.
Find free books.
Since cell phones are said to cause cancer with the magnetic waves they create, how many people in LA will be suing Los Alamos in the near future?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Or does the "eery noise" the field device made when energized sound a lot like the TARDIS from Doctor Who?
I once read about an alternative field theory which would make spacetravel at ftl speed possible, all that was needed was a spinning superconductor over a 100T Magnetic field.
The Theory was called the Burkhardt-Heim Theory or something, it also predicted the masses of most elementary particles quite accurately.
Unfortunately it also predicted a new kind of neutrino which, at the predicted energy range, does not exist, so I guess its either wrong or at least seriously flawed.
If the neighborhood still watched tube TV's, you could distort or completely blank everyone's picture within an X mile radius.
I used to work next to the french Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses (Powerful Magnetic Field National Laboratory) and was lucky enough to visit it once during the yearly Science Day (why don't we have this in the US?).
They claimed they had the second most powerful magnets in the world, IIRC behind the Fermilab, at about 32T (again, IIRC). Note that this is a sustained magnetic field, not transient as the OP's record. (still, hitting 100T without destroying the magnet is one hell of a feat! Now if only we could find a source of power to sustain such a field...).
32T is extremely high, more powerful than any natural magnetic field on Earth (according to WP, the Earth's field is about 25uT at the equator to 65uT at the poles). The most powerful permanent magnets (rare-earth) can achieve a little under 1T, and good luck getting that magnet off a piece of steel. 32T is achieved only in a space about the size of 2 coke-cans at the center of a large cylindrical apparatus that is the concentric electromagnets. But even at such a strength, the fields we make are dwarfed by stellar and interstellar magnetic fields, that have been calculated to reach hundreds or thousands of Teslas.
Fun facts: they run the magnets at night, when power is significantly cheaper. They have big banks of capacitors and batteries for spare surge power. The (classical) electromagnets aren't built by spooling wire on a tube, because wire isn't thick enough the sustain the kind of current that goes through. Instead they take a thick copper tube that they slice in a spiral and insert an isolator in the spacing.
Their most powerful magnets were formed of a core superconducting electromagnet surrounded by standard electromagnets. The cost of superconducting materials is what prevent them from making more powerful stuff.
But despite all that, I'm still not sure what kind of experiments require such powerful magnetic fields. Such awesome engineering, so few applications...
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
IIRC, Heim theory proposes a type of antigravity effect based on magnetic interactions.
The effect is difficult to test on Earth, because the effect is smaller the closer you get to a gravitational body. I seem to recall an experiment on Earth would require something like 14T to produce a measurable effect.
Maybe we could set up the Heim propulsion using this system and definitively decide whether Heim was correct?
Ah - here is the link. The paper tosses out values of 25T and 60T as needed to do interesting things.
Have gnu, will travel.
Small animals MRI machines go up to 17T.
Are you sure about that? At that field strength you have a sufficiently large diamagnetic effect to levitate small animals like a frog. A quick search on Google suggests that 7T might be the number you are looking for.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
Hope there were no lobsters in the vicinity.
Much to the scientists disappointment it still wouldn't attract girls.
Something that powerful and they had computers a couple of meters away. How does that work ? Shouldn't that have wiped off all the drives?
Researchers celebrated by having their fillings restored after a painful emergency.
In other news, superhero Dr. Magnet explained to the press that the large bulge in his trunks was merely because he'd flown too close to Los Alamos. His sidekick Alnico Girl shook her head and said "Don't believe a word that horny bastard says."
;)
http://www.lanl.gov/news/releases/magnetic_field_researchers_target_hundred_tesla_goal.html has the sound file and imagery updated now:
"The sound that the 100 T multi-shot magnet makes is due to the electrical current modulation from the 3 phase power converters (known as 12 pulse converters) and the harmonics associated with the chopping of the sinusoidal input power. The magnet vibrates at the electrical current frequencies multiplied by 12 (i.e. ~ 55 Hz x 12 = 660 Hz) hence making an audible sound. The generator is not run at full speed (1650 RPM instead of 1800 RPM) so the frequency is slightly lower than US Line frequency (i.e. 55 Hz instead of 60 Hz). A spectrograph of the sound from the magnet pulse shows the multiple harmonics as reddish horizontal bands as a function of time."
Wait until Livermore powers up the bobble generator they're building in secret.