Any one here with more than my high school physics class, care to explain the scope of the improvement? Are we going from 2 x10^-5 tesla (average earth magnetic field) to .... what?
Is this a little improvement or a huge leap forward? The article seems to position it as a huge leap but I did not see any numbers that I can understand.
“On Sept. 5, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of *20 tesla*...”
“But the new high-temperature superconductor material, made in the form of a flat, ribbon-like tape, makes it possible to achieve a higher magnetic field in a smaller device, equaling the performance that would be achieved in an apparatus 40 times larger in volume using conventional low-temperature superconducting magnets.”
Or conversely, the apparatus could be less than 1/40th the size, with commensurately less heat to bleed off the field generator, and finer control.
20 tesla = 10^6 * (2*10^-5) tesla = one million times larger = six orders of magnitude.
“On Sept. 5, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of *20 tesla*...”
A key word here is ‘large’, and another is ‘ramped’. Small superconducting electromagnets have generated a brief field strength of about 45 tesla. This achievement is a sustained - even if not for long - strength of 20. For hot fusion, it looks like what has been needed for decades is a way of generating at least 8-10 tesla.
> 2 x10^-5 tesla
Well, to 200 Tesla (not the car ;-)
That’s 7 orders of magnitude. That’s hugh.