Chinese physicists produce most powerful stable magnetic field on Earth

An all-superconducting magnet built by Chinese scientists has generated a world-record steady magnetic field of 35.1 tesla, about 700,000 times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field.

The development could have implications for anything that requires highly powerful magnets, like aerospace electromagnetic propulsion, power transmission, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), nuclear fusion and superconducting magnetic levitation, or maglev.

The fully superconducting magnet developed by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Plasma Physics operated stably for 30 minutes before being safely demagnetised.

“This validated the reliability of the technical solution and provided an important platform for conducting various sample experiments under 35.1 tesla conditions in a fully superconducting magnet,” CAS said on Monday.

A tesla (T) is an international unit of magnetic flux density, or the strength of a magnetic field. The Earth’s magnetic field is around 0.00005T, while a superconducting magnet in an MRI machine is around 3T.

The team included researchers from the Hefei International Applied Superconductivity Centre, the Energy Research Institute of Hefei Comprehensive National Science Centre and Tsinghua University.

South China Morning Post