Superconductors, high medical application

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 ). 

Because of the rapidly increasing availability of cryocoolers, numerous new applications have become possible many of these involve infrared imaging systems, spectroscopy, and high-temperature superconductors in the medical and communication fields. Many of these applications have required additional control of cryocooler-generated vibration and EMI susceptibility. 

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