• Question: do you work with super conducters anf if you do what is your work with them?

    Asked by conorduguid to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 19 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      Hi, that’s a great question. Yes I am sometimes involved in projects that use supercomputers to solve really difficult problems. For example we know that a proton is made up of 3 quarks all stuck together by the strong force (called quantum chromodynamics). Now the strong force is…yes strong and that makes it difficult to calculate what happens. But if the problem can be coded on a supercomputer then we can learn lots of things. My colleagues use an IBM blue computer…very high tech.

    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      Hey, this question was about superconductors, not supercomputers! 🙂
      So yes, we use a lot of them. Maybe more than anyone else on the planet. I mean, I don’t use them in my lab directly, but I work with the Large Hadron Collider, and the Large Hadron Collider is a superconducting machine.
      It’s not something that’s done for fun. We don’t really use superconductors because we like them, but because it’s the only technical solution to our problem. To build a machine like the LHC, where particle beams of enormous energy are kept flying in a circle, you need veeeery strong magnets. Plus, these magnets have to have adjustable field, because they need to be made stronger and stronger while the beam is being accelerated from low energy to high energy. That means we need electric magnets, but the electric current we need in our magnets needs to be so huge to make them strong enough that normal magnets would simply evaporate immediately from the heat that the resistance in the magnet coil creates.
      So we need to go superconducting. And as you might know, the Large Hadron Collider is an enormous machine. We have almost 2000 superconducting magnets in there, each one 15 meters long and 35 tons heavy. 6000 tons of material to be cooled down to extremely low temperatures to make the coils and cables superconducting! And when I say “extremely low temperatures”, I mean EXTREMELY LOW TEMPERATURES. We need to transport that much heat away from our magnet coils to keep them cool that we need a so-called superfluid coolant to do it. Superfluids flow without any resistance, but you don’t get such a thing easily. The only way for us to get a superfluid is to use Helium and cool it to -271 degrees Celsius! That is 1.8 Kelvin, 1.8 degrees above absolute zero. That is colder than the coldest regions of outer space, which are still warm and cozy in comparison at about 3 degrees above absolute zero from the leftover radiation of the Big Bang.
      Oh, and yeah, the material we use for superconducting coils and cables is plain niobium-titanium. There are high-tech superconductors that become superconducting at much higher temperatures, but they are a lot more expensive and very difficult to use (too brittle to form coils easily, because they are more like ceramics).
      Yay superconductors! 🙂

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 21 Nov 2013:

      I’m afraid I don’t work with super conductors. My experiment uses a powerful magnet, but it’s a ‘normal’ one that doesn’t use any superconducting stuff.

      The magnet is used to bend charged particles as they travel through our detector. The amount of bending the particles undergo is directly related to their energy, so we can measure their ‘bendiness’ and get their energy and momentum.

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