Unleashing A Magnetic Tornado For Superconductivity

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  skipper

  Ok, they appear to have discovered or uncovered an interaction at a high magnetic field strength, that involves the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron/proton masses, when these are cooled to milliK temperatures. Since the flow or flux is still electric charge, the carriers must be something like the anyonic states in the FQHE, I bet this is connected to phase-precession in the AB effect too (where electrons interact with a shielded magnetic field when classically this is forbidden or impossible).
  
  Spin in fermions is probably the hardest aspect of quantum mechanics to really get a grip on. It's the thing Bohr meant when he quipped about a theory being "not even wrong", and how as he claimed, thinking you understand it, or what exactly Planck's constant means, indicates you haven't understood it after all.
  
  I'd say there are a few more surprises up ahead. After all we're just following the path we think we need to take, investigating these intrinsic properties of matter. We build enormous machines that fail at the last hurdle, perhaps because we don't really understand how to make them work like we want? Or, if we do, we're asking too much of what we think we know, and nature steps in to remind us how fickle she can be, or how misguided we can sometimes be when it comes to "being on the right path".
  
  The LHC is a first for 'classical superconducting' magnets, and so far the tech hasn't lived up to design expectations. Shit happens when you push technology into corners where it might not fit that well; energizing supercooled metals with high intensity magnetic fields, at the scale of the LHC just might be the bridge to far.
  
  But we'll at least learn that the classical approach is perhaps not the best after all, we may need to abandon the idea of building high-energy accelerators (actually, there's a buzz going around that says much the same thing about the LHC, it might be the last, and most expensive failure in particle physics, we'll have to see if the tech hurdles can be overcome).
  
  And, after all, the failure wasn't predicted, the expectation was that the system would function. The breakdown exposes a lack of knowledge about how materials behave at very low temperatures and high magnetic strength.
  The physics community may have to face the prospect of abandoning or upgrading (time-consumingly and expensively) the facility with newer, more robust superconducting components at some stage, if the tech problem won't stay fixed - it might happen again, or at least, now they know there is another point of failure in the system.
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  kashish0711

  totally agreed with your points. 😀
  
  well abt LHC, I heard rumors that they discovered a new particle but will only reveal it in a report after 2 years, IDK if it is true though.
  
  well all I concluded from these experiments was that electrons are not as simple as we think.
  In some superconducting materials the pair of electrons tend to break at high magnetic stresses but in this case the pairs didn't break and this could be the key for making superconductors that work at high temperatures.
  
  We just need to study and learn about this bonding and how the electrons tend to totally change their characteristics at low temperature and tend to make pair instead of getting repelled. This mystery when solved, I am sure we will have the means to produce the superconductors at commercial level.
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  skipper

  My take on the buzz, is that the LHC will operate for 2-3 years collating data before there's a reliable set to analyze or sift through. The expectation is that interesting events will be announced during this run.
  
  It's the most complex system ever built, they do everything very slowly and precisely; aiming beams of protons so they intersect at those distances is not a trivial task; it could be that initial successes will encounter further system failures that were unforeseen (apparently the magnets failing was an expected, but unwanted possibility). Everyone is waiting to see.
  
  Also, as the news item you posted says, there are plenty of other researchers around. The team at Fermilab might find evidence for the Higgs before the LHC team does. The Higgs is "required" to close the QM theory or describe the "mass origin" process (explain where mass comes from, and possibly how the early universe got the force of gravity to play around with).
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  kashish0711

  Yeah true
  and they can't really be sure on what kind of problems they might face as the technology they used in LHC didn't even existed when they started building it and therefore not much operational checks for long durations.
  
  But even if they fail in their work, we are still gonna learn a lot of new stuff that we didn't expected and that's for what we do all these researches, always looking for something unexpected. 😀
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  jhbalaji

  ummm. Great let we wait and see what scientists going to do with it mate...