Applications

Abstract

The conventional low-temperature superconductors (LTS) have found various technical applications. The most important one is the production of high-field magnets in the range of 5–10 T, which are widely used both in the technical applications as in particle accelerators and in magnetic-resonance-imaging devices, and in research laboratories for production of high magnetic fields. In construction of these magnets, usually two materials are used: the Nb–Ti alloy with Tc = 9 K and Nb3Sn with Tc = 18 K, which are cooled down to 4 K by liquid helium. The critical current in these materials is of the order of 105 Acm−2 in the magnetic fields up to 10 T. It is practically impossible to construct such high-field magnets with room-temperature coils since it requires enormous electric power and complicated cooling equipment. Various high-quality superconducting electronic devices, such as superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), microwave devices, detectors, etc., have been also elaborated (for reviews, see [185, 892]).