Liquid WHAT?
Um, a high-temperature superconductor is one that doesn't need liquid helium. Liquid nitrogen is exactly what one does use to cool down the high-temperature ones.
Boffins at the University of Cambridge say they've packed the equivalent of three tonnes of magnetic force into a superconducting material roughly the size of a golf ball. In what they call a “trapped field” experiment, the university says its researchers managed to cram a 17.6 Tesla magnetic field into the brittle “high …
It's more that liquid nitrogen is cheap (about as much as milk was the cost I've been told), due to it's abundance (~78% of the air). Liquid helium can be manufactured in just the same way, but at 0.0005% by volume in air, it's quite a bit more expensive than LN2.
You will also have the interesting problem of finding something to do with 150,000 litres of liquid nitrogen for every litre of liquid helium you produce.
Oh yeah, and liquid helium is a superfluid, so if you poured it into a cup it would just climb up the sides.
Certainly the word for a material which can break up under its own magnetic field. When we saw a sample a number of years ago, someone suggested that if a real room temperature version could be achieved, it would be an extremely useful way of protecting power semiconductors from short circuits.
How feasible maglevs with liquid nitrogen coolers on board will be, given the difficulties of running conventional railways with quite ordinary power electrics, is left as an exercise to the reader.
Historically room temperature magnets have managed about a 60:1 force to mass ratio (which on its own is pretty impressive)
This thing is at least 3000:1 .
Sadly as the article notes magnet improvements are relatively slow, given the previous record has stood since 2004.
Other neat stuff that high power magnets improve are most kinds of fusion system (both conventional TOKAMAK and less mainstream designs) and Ion drives for spacecraft.
Not forgetting the potential for ridiculously expensive headphones for DJ's
Well done boffins.
Gadolinium Barium Copper Oxide is usually represented with the symbol(s), GdBaCuO.
Gd for Gadolinium;
Ba for Barium;
Cu for Copper, and O for Oxygen.
To be even more pedantic, B would be the chemical symbol for Boron;
C would be the chemical symbol for Carbon.
So did they actually use Gadolinium Barium Copper Oxide? Or did they use Gadolinium Boron Carbon Monoxide?
Isn't gadolinium chemically similar to yttrium, used in the famous 1-2-3 material?
Also worth mentioning, there is a link between dielectric strength and Tc so adding manganese to a given material may substantially boost Tc at the expense of Jc.
The highest Tc material I am aware of is TaBaCu3Ox which superconducts at -9C according to some researchers but the useable fraction is vanishingly low.