Accelerator Magnet with Brittle Superconductor Sets a Record

At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Ron Scanlan and colleagues are investigating the use of brittle superconducting cable to create accelerator bending magnets significantly stronger than those designed for the abandoned Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) and CERN's much‐anticipated Large Hadron Collider (LHC). With the 1‐meter‐long prototype dipole magnet shown here end‐on, the group recently achieved a record bending field of 13.5 tesla in the 5 cm beam aperture visible at the center.