Fifty Percent Boost for Niobium–tin

Published June 20, 2019

Non-Cu Jc-B curves of the APC wire given various heat treatments and the state-of-the-art Nb3Sn wire as reference, as well as the FCC Jc specification

MagLab users have modified the critical current of Nb₃SN, a material that was thought to be fully exploited, and boosted its performance by 50%.

What did scientists discover?

Recently-developed superconductor wires, based on widely used Nb₃Sn, have discovered a new technique to make finer crystalline grains and pin magnetic flux while carrying an electrical current in high magnetic fields. These new wires have shown impressive increases in operational magnetic field ranges as well as improved current carrying properties at high magnetic fields. This improvement in current-carrying capability is significant – a 50% increase - for a practical superconductor long thought, until now, to be fully developed with little room for improvement.

Why is this important?

This is an important practical and engineering result. It meets the performance thought to be needed for the proposed Future Circular Collider; a multi-billion-dollar particle accelerator proposed to advance the highest reaches of high energy physics. This wire could also impact medical devices for high field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and ultra-high-field Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) applications, such as brain imaging.

Who did the research?

M. D. Sumption¹, X. Xu², J. Rochester¹, X. Peng³, E. W. Collings¹

¹The Ohio State University; ²Fermilab; ³Hyper Tech Research Inc.

Why did they need the MagLab?

The high fields available at the MagLab were critical to this research. Such measurements require magnetic fields that exceed the upper operational fields (critical fields, B_c2) of these advanced wires (B_c2 ~ 28T at 4.2 K). Our measurements also required the ability to supply large currents in applied fields from 15-25 T. Only the MagLab can provide such facilities.