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However, currently known high-temperature superconductors are brittle ceramics that are expensive to manufacture and not easily formed into wires or other useful shapes. [4] Therefore, the applications for HTS have been where it has some other intrinsic advantage, e.g. in: low thermal loss current leads for LTS devices (low thermal conductivity),
The table below shows some of the parameters of common superconductors. X:Y means material X doped with element Y, T C is the highest reported transition temperature in kelvins and H C is a critical magnetic field in tesla. "BCS" means whether or not the superconductivity is explained within the BCS theory.
The first practical application of superconductivity was developed in 1954 with Dudley Allen Buck's invention of the cryotron. [22] Two superconductors with greatly different values of the critical magnetic field are combined to produce a fast, simple switch for computer elements.
BSCCO superconductors already have large-scale applications. For example, tens of kilometers of BSCCO-2223 at 77 K superconducting wires are being used in the current leads of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN [10] (but the main field coils are using metallic lower temperature superconductors, mainly based on niobium–tin).
Ceramic superconductors cannot be bolted or welded together to form superconducting junctions. Ceramic superconductors must be cast in their final shape when created. This may increase production costs. [citation needed] Ceramic superconductors can be more easily driven out of superconductivity by oscillating magnetic fields.
The motivation for using superconductors in RF cavities is not to achieve a net power saving, but rather to increase the quality of the particle beam being accelerated. Though superconductors have little AC electrical resistance, the little power they do dissipate is radiated at very low temperatures, typically in a liquid helium bath at 1.6 K ...
Yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) is a family of crystalline chemical compounds that display high-temperature superconductivity; it includes the first material ever discovered to become superconducting above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen [77 K (−196.2 °C; −321.1 °F)] at about 93 K (−180.2 °C; −292.3 °F).
The most commonly used conventional superconductor in applications is a niobium-titanium alloy - this is a type-II superconductor with a superconducting critical temperature of 11 K. The highest critical temperature so far achieved in a conventional superconductor was 39 K (-234 °C) in magnesium diboride .