Superconducting Niobium-Titanium: Enabler for Affordable MRI and the Search for the Higgs Boson

Abstract

In 1961, Bell Telephone Laboratories researchers startled the world of physics by reporting that, at temperatures near absolute zero, a superconducting niobium-tin compound could support enormous electric current densities without resistance in the presence of very high magnetic fields. Suddenly, it became possible to fabricate supermagnets that generate high magnetic fields with unprecedented efficiency and economy. Scientists raced to find additional such materials and also to account theoretically for their behavior. Disregarded early on as unpromising, niobium-titanium alloys eventually emerged from among thousands of superconductors to become the most widely used, finding application in many thousands of MRI medical imaging systems and in huge particle accelerator magnets. In 1962, at Atomics International, experiments that revealed the supermagnet promise of niobium-titanium alloys also made essential contributions to the confirmation of the initially overlooked superconductivity theories of Soviet scientists Ginzburg, Landau, Abrikosov, and Gor'kov as the appropriate framework for understanding the physics of high magnetic field superconductivity.