Fermilab and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
High-field superconducting magnets
The Very High Field Superconducting Magnet Collaboration will test BSCC02212, a bismuth-based material that may allow scientists to create high-field superconducting magnets that could exceed 50 Tesla, or more than twice the strength of existing magnets.
In the project’s first phase, Fermilab will purchase the bismuth-based material from US vendors to conduct cabling and coil studies. Collaboration members will research the material’s properties in detail and determine how much they can stretch it and whether they can make it into cables. Collaboration member institutions include: Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab, Florida State University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology and Texas A&M University.
Collaboration members will partner with businesses to encourage industrial fabrication of high-field magnets, an effort that could result in cutting edge technologies for other applications. Fermilab’s development and construction of the first reliable superconducting accelerator magnets for the Tevatron approximately 30 years ago led to industrial fabrication that resulted in such applications as medical MRI systems.
The development of high-field magnets could also provide a path forward for a possible muon collider at Fermilab.