Magnetic resonance imaging, superconductors

Fig. 2. Electrical lead comprised of a high-temperature superconductor can carry a current of 2000 amperes. A variety of uses include magnetic resonance imaging and superconducting magnetic energy storage. (Westinghouse Electric Corporation)...

What new developments the future holds nobody knows for certain. In electronics people will try to miniaturise electric equipment even further. Non-functional, ceramic packaging will be converted into functional components. For this new ceramic materials are necessary, as are ways to process them. High-temperature superconductors will lead to magnetic levitation craft, cheap electricity and improved MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). 

Kamerlingh Onnes, at the University of Leiden, discovered superconductivity in 1911. He found that the resistance of some metallic wires became zero at very low temperature it did not just approach zero, there was no dissipation of heat. At that time his laboratory was the only one equipped for studies at the temperature of liquid He (bp 4.1 K). Theoretical explanations of the phenomenon did not appear until the work of John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and Robert Schrieffer in 1957. They received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972. The expense and difficulty of applying superconductivity to practical problems limits the applications. Nevertheless, superconductor magnets of very high field are now widely used in NMR in chemistry and the medical diagnostic applications of NMR called MRI (magnetic resonance imaging—they wanted to avoid the word "nuclear ). 

Superconductivity dates back to 1911, when a Dutch physicist determined that the element mercury, when cooled to minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit, has virtually no electrical resistance. That is, it lost zero electric power when used as a means to distribute electricity from one spot to another. Two decades later, in 1933, a German physicist named Walther Meissner discovered that superconductors have no interior magnetic field. This property enabled superconductivity to be put to commercial use by 1984, when magnetic resonance imaging machines (MRIs) were commercialized for medical imaging. 

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