Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Tokyo accidentally created the strongest controllable magnetic field in history and blew the doors of their lab in the process.
As detailed in a paper recently published in the Review of Scientific Instruments, the researchers produced the magnetic field to test the material properties of a new generator system.
They were expecting to reach peak magnetic field intensities of around 700 Teslas, but the machine instead produced a peak of 1,200 Teslas.
This is the strongest magnetic field ever generated in a controlled, indoor environment, but it’s not the strongest magnetic field produced in history.
This honor belongs to some Russian researchers who created a 2,800 Tesla magnetic field in 2001.
This technique causes a brief spike in the strength of the magnetic field by rapidly “squeezing” it to a smaller size.
“I didn’t expect it to be so high,” Shojiro Takeyama, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, told IEEE Spectrum. »
