Lab Constructs Strongest Magnet

The most powerful magnet in the world has been built at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

The magnet, which is a superconducting coil made of niobium-tin alloy, has a field strength of 13.5 tesla - 250,000 times as strong as the Earth’s magnetic field and 22 percent more powerful than the previous record-holder, a Dutch magnet constructed in 1995.

A series of such magnets could one day be used by particle physicists to accelerate and smash particles together with unprecedented energies. “This could open up a new range of high-energy physics,” says Ron Scanlan, who led the research team.