Word: niobium
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...until the 1950s that scientists discovered alloys, such as niobium tin and niobium titanium, that keep their superconductivity in the presence of intensely strong magnetic fields. And it was not until the '60s and '70s that the manufacture of large superconducting magnets became standardized. But progress toward the other goal of superconductivity researchers, pushing the phenomenon into a practical temperature range, was even slower. By 1973, some 62 years after Kamerlingh Onnes had found superconductivity in mercury at 4.2 K, scientists had upped the temperature to only 23 K, using an alloy of niobium and germanium. After 1973: no improvement...
...much sought-after goal proved to be elusive. In the early 1970s scientists found an alloy of niobium and germanium that lost all resistance at 23 K. Then, last April, a group at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland announced development of a compound of barium, lanthanum, copper and oxygen that appeared to begin the transition to superconductivity...
...mile circumference could embrace Manhattan, Barbados or (almost) Bahrain. Its 2 billion ft. of niobium-titanium wire could encircle the world 16 times. The 150 megawatts of power needed to operate it could light up a city of 15,000. And its price tag of as much as $6 billion could purchase half a dozen new space shuttles. All told, the superconducting supercollider (SSC), a gigantic particle accelerator that the Department of Energy may begin constructing somewhere in the U.S. before the end of the decade, would be the biggest, most elaborate and most ambitious physics project ever undertaken...
...detect a fugitive monopole, Cabrera used a kind of magnetic mousetrap, which was connected to a SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device). He turned a coil of niobium, a platinum-gray metallic element, into a superconductor of electricity by cooling it to within nine degrees of absolute zero (minus 460° F). Current thus moved through it without resistance, allowing the slightest twitch in the current's flow to be recorded. At 1:53 p.m. on Feb. 14, the magnetic flux in Cabrera's device jumped eight steps, exactly what was expected if a Dirac monopole passed through. Cabrera...
...young colleagues-Arthur Hebard, now at Bell Laboratories, and George LaRue-devised an updated version of the classical "oil drop" experiment, first used by Robert Millikan in 1910 to measure the charge on a single electron. Instead of oil drops, the Fairbank team relied on tiny spheres of niobium, a metal that becomes a superconductor when it is chilled to near absolute zero. When the sphere is levitated in a strong magnetic field, and virtually stripped of electrical charge, any charge that remains-even the minuscule charge of a single electron or, more significantly, a fraction of that charge...