They were expecting to reach peak magnetic field intensities of around 700 Teslas, but the machine instead produced a peak of 1,200 Teslas
Researchers at the University of Tokyo wanted to create a strong magnetic field, but they got way more than they expected. The instrument was designed to generate superstrong magnetic fields for examining semiconductors and other materials at the nanometer scale.
IEEE Spectrum reports as detailed in a paper recently published in the Review of Scientific Instruments, the researchers produced the magnetic field to test the material properties of a new generator system.
They were expecting to reach peak magnetic field intensities of around 700 Teslas, but the machine instead produced a peak of 1,200 Teslas. (For the sake of comparison, a refrigerator magnet has about 0.01 Tesla)
Bigger magnetic fields have been made before, but they aren’t practical or reliably reproducible, because they rely on rather dangerous amounts of TNT. It is not an indoor activity.
The hope is that the field can be controlled well enough that materials can be placed inside the tiny field so researchers can bring the electrons to their “quantum limit,” in which the particles are all in their ground state, revealing properties that researchers have yet to discover. In that case, bigger is better.
The other possible application—once they get the explosions worked out of the system—is use in fusion reactors, a type of energy-producing device in which plasma is held stable using a strong magnetic field as its hydrogen fuses, creating a reaction similar to that of the sun and producing almost limitless clean energy. According to the release, researchers believe they need to be able to control a 1,000-tesla magnetic field to produce sustained nuclear fusion.
Frog in magnetic fields