This material has the potential to produce magnetic fields of about 20 Tesla (T), though the current prototype hasn’t hit that strength yet. For comparison, in 2022, Chinese researchers created the world’s strongest steady-state magnet which had a strength of 45.22 T. The Earth’s magnetic field is about a million times weaker than these magnets.
“These HTS magnets have a lot of engineering challenges, and they’re quite different to the previous generation of superconducting magnet,” Mataira says. “The fusion community broadly thought that the magnet engineering was impossible, and that getting one of these HTS magnets to work without being connected to a power supply over time was going to be too difficult.