Critical Currents and Magnet Applications of High‐ $T_{c}$ Superconductors

JUN 01, 1991

What has become of the great expectations of 1987? Achieving critical currents high enough for practical magnet applications is no easy matter with materials as complex as the high‐temperature superconducting compounds. But prospects are now very bright.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881305

David Larbalestier

The discovery of a 92 K superconductor in early 1987 by M. K. Wu, Paul Chu and their coworkers at the Universities of Alabama and Houston produced widespread euphoria. Newspapers and magazines of every conceivable political and social persuasion speculated on the applications of superconductivity. Some even foretold a new age; after the stone, bronze, iron, steel and semiconductor ages would come the superconductor age. Most of the applications envisaged for this new age depended on the generation of strong magnetic fields, frequently in large volumes. Thus the vanishing of resistance in the superconducting state was the key property for these applications, and it is this ability to carry very large current densities without ohmic loss that forms the essential thread of this article.

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David Larbalestier, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Critical Currents and Magnet Applications of High‐Tc Superconductors

References

More about the authors

Critical Currents and Magnet Applications of High‐ $T_{c}$ Superconductors