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Cambridge Team Breaks Superconductor World Record
An anonymous reader writes University of Cambridge scientists have broken a decade-old superconducting record by packing a 17.6 Tesla magnetic field into a golf ball-sized hunk of crystal — equivalent to about three tons of force. From the Cambridge announcement: "A world record that has stood for more than a decade has been broken by a team led by University of Cambridge engineers, harnessing the equivalent of three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china. The Cambridge researchers managed to 'trap' a magnetic field with a strength of 17.6 Tesla — roughly 100 times stronger than the field generated by a typical fridge magnet — in a high temperature gadolinium barium copper oxide (GdBCO) superconductor, beating the previous record by 0.4 Tesla."
I'm impressed, but I'm not sure about even the most theoretical engineering applications of a little more field strength. Higher heat tolerance is easy to grapple with, but this an improvement that's hard to imagine practical applications for.
I'm off to buy roughly 101 fridge magnets, and you'll be seeing me in the Beer Book of Bets shortly.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
>> a strength of 17.6 Tesla â" roughly 100 times stronger than the field generated by a typical fridge magnet ...only if you have the kind of fridge magnets that once in place are then permanently inseperable from your fridge.
The fucking owners of /. ratcheting it up a notch, this morning landed again on beta, despite for not asking it.
Than the clicker to go back to classic did not work...
I was like WTF, they now need extra scripts or what to make that trip back to the old...
About a minute or so, the page reloaded and the link work as it is supposed too.
I think I was just subject of an experiment, very much like the one on farcebook, forced to look at the vomit called beta...
The message is, beta is coming, resistance is futile
You can mod me off-topic or whatever you want but I think this tactics we are witnessing here is despicable at best
Just tell WHY WHY, really WHY????
Magnetic levitation perpetual motion hovercars will be in production any minute now!
One of the hazards that long duration space travellers will face is radiation. The Earth's magnetic field draws incoming particles to the poles, thus protecting us. Could these powerful magnets be utilized on spacecraft to provide a similar function, drawing incoming particles to a sacrificial target or an area of the spacecraft that is hardened against radiation?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
While I'm sure that this will this is quite an accomplishment, this doesn't seem to be a superconductor world record, just a world record that involved a superconductor. A world record for a superconductor would be one with unprecedented stability or superconductivity closer to room temperature than ever before.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
3 tonnes / 100 times as strong as a typical fridge magnet.
Maybe fridge magnets are going downhill, but I don't remember ever possessing one I could hang 30kg off.
Reading the paper itself, the only reason they achieved this result was by gambling on a sample with enough purity to hold the magnetic force. They tried two other samples and failed. We won't be seeing any applications of this result until they can figure out enough process improvements to make the 33% success rate better.
It's worth noting that this solenoid research was funded by Boeing, so one might assume that an impressively powerful solenoid that operates at ~100K would be extraordinarily useful for making a missile that can turn on a dime.
a typical fridge magnet is about 0.005 Tesla
Neodymium–iron–boron magnets are about 1.2 Tesla
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
How did they power down that experiment? If they let the temperature rise until it drops out of superconductivity, it'd explode. Or did they just load magnetic field until it burst and chalked up the maximum as a new record? That's almost enough to make magnetic munitions - shells that explode on impact and also pack an EMP wallop.
And fools like you see no difference between the two.
Boron is B, Barium is Ba...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
It is a small city next to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the Charles river. Thanks for sharing the link.
Electromagnitism is usually considered the best understood of the four forces but the lack of real progress in room temperature superconducting suggests we have a way to go to understanding even that. It's plausible its not possible but if we really understand EM then the mathematics for its impossibility should exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you want to express force in conceptually simple terms, you should convert it to elephant pulls. Or Schwartzneggers.
no, long ton and short ton (what is meant in common speech) are units of force. in the UK (long) 2240 avoirdupois pounds, in the USA(short) 2000.
Metric ton is unit of mass
The same power as 17 Teslas in a golf ball, I wonder what range you get out of one of those.
Better magnetic "mirrors" and/or "lenses" for focusing beams in things like the LHC or even just an electron microscope?
Actually it is not the focussing magnets for the LHC but more the bending magnets. Doubling the field strength will roughly double the energy we could reach. However you have to be able to make several tens of kilometres of these magnets for that which means they have to be incredibly stable otherwise the machine will not work. Currently we use 9.6T bending magnets - this is no where near a world record but stability is very important.
this an improvement that's hard to imagine practical applications for.
Well you could using this field strength to levitate frogs which would make for a cool lecture demonstration!