China's new resistive magnet is 800,000 times stronger than Earth's field
Scientists in China have created a mind-bogglingly powerful resistive magnet that has officially broken the world record by sustaining an incredible 42.02 tesla. That is over 800,000 times stronger than the magnetic field produced by Earth itself, which has a flux density of about 50 microtesla.
The new record was set on September 22 at the Steady High Magnetic Field Facility (SHMFF) in Hefei, narrowly edging out the previous record of 41.4 tesla held by another resistive magnet at the National High Magnetic Field Lab in Florida since 2017.
As for why scientists are so determined to push the limits of magnetism, physicist Joachim Wosnitza from Germany's Dresden lab explained that it opens up all kinds of bizarre new realms of physics to explore. Essentially, the stronger the magnetism, the greater the chances of discovering new states of matter.
Another physicist noted that high magnetism allows scientists to engineer and manipulate entirely new phases of matter that simply don't exist under normal conditions. Each additional tesla achieved also makes instruments exponentially more sensitive for detecting faint phenomena.
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