Saturday, September 29, 2018

Record 1200 Tesla, and then, BANG!

Hey, would you sacrifice your equipment just so you can break the record on the strongest magnetic field created in a lab? These people would.

Speaking with IEEE Spectrum, lead researcher Shojiro Takeyama explained that his team was hoping to achieve a magnetic field that reached 700 Tesla (the unit of measurement for gauging the strength of a magnetic field). At that level, the generator would likely self destruct, but when pushed to its limits the machine actually achieved a strength of 1,200 Tesla.

To put that in perspective, an MRI machine — which is the most intense indoor magnetic field most people would ever encounter — comes in at just three Tesla. Needless to say, the researchers’ machine didn’t survive the test, but it did land them in the record books.



Honestly, I don't think I can get away with doing that!

Zz.

1 comment:

Douglas Natelson said...

We had a colloquium here at Rice around 15 years ago from the pulsed field group at the LANL branch of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Shaped explosive charges to compress a ring-shaped copper bus bar in sync with the firing of a capacitor bank to slam current through it. Hundreds of tesla transiently, but destructive. Very impressive, though a bit on the mad science side.