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posted by janrinok on Sunday November 13 2016, @01:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the very-attractive dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

After a decade of planning, designing and building, the Florida State University-based National High Magnetic Field Laboratory now has the strongest magnet in the world for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, a powerful technique used to study molecular structures in proteins and materials. The 33-ton engineering marvel, called the series connected hybrid (SCH) magnet, successfully broke the record this week during a series of tests conducted by MagLab engineers and scientists.

The instrument reached its full field of 36 tesla Tuesday afternoon. Tesla is a unit of magnetic field strength. For example, a strong refrigerator magnet is .01 tesla, and a typical MRI machine is 1.5 to 3 tesla.

[...] What makes the SCH unique is that it can create a very high magnetic field that is also of very high quality. For magnets, quality means a field that remains constant over both the time it takes to run an experiment and the space in which the experiment takes place in the magnet. Unlike most of the physics research done in magnets, NMR requires fields that are very stable and homogeneous.

At 36 tesla, the SCH is more than 40 percent stronger than the previous world-record NMR magnet (the MagLab's Keck magnet) and more than 50 percent more powerful than the highest field high-resolution NMR magnet, a 23.5 tesla system in Lyon, France.

In NMR, scientists use magnets and radio waves to locate a specific element (commonly hydrogen) in proteins and other samples, which helps them figure out those complex structures. A powerful technique in health research, scientists use it, for example, to pinpoint a virus' vulnerability to drugs.

Source: http://news.fsu.edu/news/science-technology/2016/11/09/national-maglab-racks-new-world-record-hybrid-magnet/


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 13 2016, @06:17PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 13 2016, @06:17PM (#426291) Journal
    Continuous magnetic field strength is one of the hardest physical parameters to improve. It is sobering to realize that it is possible to buy in the mail a cheap permanent magnet with field strength at room temperature (~1.5 Tesla) which is roughly 25 times weaker than the best magnetic field strength generated with this device. In comparison, a cathode ray tube in a TV could deliver electron beams about five orders of magnitude weaker energy per electron than the best possible. Similarly, the vacuum of the cathode ray tube (which tends to be pretty good for consumer-grade gear) would be around eight or nine orders of magnitude weaker than the best possible vacuum achieved on Earth.