Cambridge Team Breaks Superconductor World Record 73
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."
Stronger? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:ummm...nope (Score:5, Interesting)
Which would be odd, seeing as how in US parlance 'fridge magnet' does indeed mean a magnet intended to attach to your fridge, typically containing advertising or cute sayings, or holding things like sheets of your kid's art up.
Per wiki a typical fridge magnet is 5 mt, or .005 Tesla. So this experiment is more like 3000X as strong as a fridge magnet.
This thing is 10X as strong as most of my 'fridge' magnets, but then I like to play with neodymium ones.
Going by my experience, their 'fridge magnets' would hold to a fridge very well without requiring excessive strength to pull off. Most of mine you have to think about it a bit.
Oh, and 16T is enough to levitate a frog. [wikipedia.org]