magnetic field tagged posts

Sandia National Laboratories technician Eric Breden installs a transmission cable on the silver disk that is the new pulsed-power machine’s central powerflow assembly. Credit: Randy Montoya

A new Sandia National Laboratories accelerator called Thor is expected to be 40X more efficient than Sandia’s Z machine, the world’s largest and most powerful pulsed-power accelerator, in generating pressures to study materials under extreme conditions.”Thor’s magnetic field will reach about one million atmospheres, about the pressures at Earth’s core,” said David Reisman, lead theoretical physicist.

Though unable to match Z’s 5 million atmospheres, the completed Thor will be smaller—2,000 rather than 10,000 square feet—and will be considerably more efficient due to design improvements that use hundre...

By evaporating indium gallium arsenide onto a gallium arsenide substrate TUM physicists created nanometer-scale hills, so-called quantum dots. An electron trapped in one of these quantum dots can be used to store information. Hitherto unknown memory loss mechanisms could be switched off by applying a magnetic field. Credit: Fabian Flassig / TUM

Magnetic field helps qubit electrons store information longer. Physicists have tracked down semiconductor nanostructure mechanisms that can result in the loss of stored information – and halted the amnesia using an external magnetic field. The new nanostructures comprise common semiconductor materials compatible with standard manufacturing processes.

In principle, there are various possibilities of implementing qubits: photons are an option equally ...

This illustration of the region surrounding our Solar System shows the estimated location of the two-million-year-old supernova, lying close to the galactic magnetic field, that may have been the source for some high-energy cosmic rays observed today. Credit: Michael Kachelrieß, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

High-energy protons, nuclei, and other particles are constantly showering down on Earth’s atmosphere from space, but the origins of these cosmic rays is unknown. One possibility is that the cosmic rays come from supernovae, although the evidence for this claim is limited...

A cutaway view of the proposed ARC reactor. Thanks to powerful new magnet technology, the much smaller, less-expensive ARC reactor would deliver the same power output as a much larger reactor. Credit: the MIT ARC team

Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor—and it’s one that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say. Using rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, to produce high-magnetic field coils “just ripples through the whole design,” says Prof Dennis Whyte.

The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma—that is, the working material of a fusion reaction—but in a much smaller device than those ...