Sep 11, 2010 07:47 GMT  ·  By

Experts at Berkeley Lab recently took a hard look at how future particle accelerators will be powered, and naturally arrived at the conclusion that superconductor technologies need improvement.

Superconductors and superconducting magnets have been around for some time, and they promise to underlie a new range of extremely advanced technologies.

These include, but are not limited to fusion energy, efficient motors and generators, very fast computers, levitating trains, and incredibly low-voltage power grids.

Materials exhibiting superconductivity basically allow for the passing of electrical current through them without opposing any resistance to the electrons' flow.

At this point, superconducting magnets, for example, are used in a variety of applications, such as for example in particle accelerators and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines.

Due to their incredible properties, they have become the materials of choice for many fields. They can be used for magnetically separating minerals, or inside ion sources for cyclotrons.

Even CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) uses this type of magnets, about 1,200 of them. The magnetic field they create helps bend proton beams. An additional 400 quadrupole magnets are also installed in its tunnels.

The LHC may be the most advanced particle accelerator of today, but plans to improve it are already heavily underway.

“Enabling the accelerators of the future depends on developing magnets with much greater field strengths than are now possible,” explains scientist GianLuca Sabbi.

“To do that, we’ll have to use different materials,” adds the expert, who is based at the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division (AFRD) of the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in California.

“Among the most promising new materials for future magnets are some of the high-temperature superconductors. Unfortunately they’re very difficult to work with,” Sabbi goes on to say.

Experts at the lab are working themselves on producing new types of superconducting magnets, that could be used in future generations of particle accelerators to get even higher energy levels.

“These magnets are being developed to make the highest-energy colliders possible,” Sabbi says.

“But as we have seen in the past, the new technology will benefit many other fields as well, from undulators for next-generation light sources to more compact medical devices,” he adds.