Superconducting materials suitable for magnets

About

The range of materials available for superconducting magnets is steadily expanding, even as the choice of material becomes potentially more complex. When virtually all magnets were cooled by helium at ~2-5 K it was easy to separate the domain of Nb-Ti from those of Nb$_{3}$Sn applications and very little surprise that more than 90% of all magnets are still made from Nb-Ti. But the development of useful conductors of the Bi-Sr-Ca-Cu-O and YBa2Cu3Ox high temperature superconductors, coupled to the recent discovery of the 39 K superconductor MgB2 and the developing availability of cryocoolers suggests that new classes of higher temperature, medium field magnets based on other than Nb-based conductors could become available in the next 5-10 years. My talks will discuss the essential physics and materials science of these 5 classes of material - Nb-Ti, Nb$_{3}$Sn, MgB2, Bi-Sr-Ca-Cu-O and YBa2Cu3Ox - in the context of those aspects of their science, properties and fabrication properties, which circumscribe their applications. Some background is given in recent papers: L. D. Cooley, P. J. Lee, and D. C. Larbalestier, 'Conductor Processing of Low-Tc Materials: The Alloy Nb-Ti,' to appear as Chapter 3.3 of The Handbook on Superconducting Materials,' Edited by David Cardwell and David Ginley, Institute of Physics UK to appear March 2002. L. D. Cooley, C. B. Eom, E. E. Hellstrom, and D. C. Larbalestier, Potential application of magnesium diboride for accelerator magnet applications, Proceedings of the 2001 Particle Accelerator Conference to appear. David Larbalestier, Alex Gurevich, Matthew Feldmann and Anatoly Polyanskii, High Transition Temperature Superconducting Materials For Electric Power Applications, Nature 414, 368-377, (2001)..

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