Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has broken a world record for the world's strongest magnet. Scientists and engineers at the lab have created a dipole magnet with the field strength of 14.7 tesla, which is more than 300,000 times the strength of the earth's magnetic pull.

The lab also held the previous record, set in 1997, for the world's strongest magnet. The previous magnet had a field strength of only 13.5 tesla.

About 20 scientists worked together in a Superconducting Magnet Group to create this new superconducting magnet. A new, simpler design was used to replace the complex coil design that had been the normal protocol.

The magnet, called the RD-3 magnet, reached its record strength on May 16. It is the most successful of a series of developmental magnets.

The success of this magnet can be attributed to two key elements-a new material called niobium tin and the new racetrack coil layout. Special efforts were made to include niobium tin in the final layout of the magnet. Because the niobium tin is a usually brittle material, it was wound with a process called the "wind and react" technique.

The cable was made from individual strands of both niobium and tin, then wound together around an iron pole. The center was filled with epoxy to make the coils. After three coil modules were wound, they were heated at approximately 680 degrees Celsius for two weeks.

The coils were then placed in an iron yolk, then encased in a 40-millimeter-thick aluminum shell.

Kem Robinson, who is in the principal division department of accelerated and fusion research, said the development of the racetrack coil geometry was a major development in the making of supercharged magnets.

"As opposed to a cosine design, which has a complex 3-dimensional geometry, the racetrack geometry is 2-dimensional, with essentially elongated ovals," he said. "It's simpler to wind, and the stresses are more easily adapted and distributed."

Robinson said the niobium also plays a large part in the success of the magnet.

"Niobium has the ability to carry greater current densities at a lower cost standard than conventional superconducting cable," Robinson said.

The low operating cost is an important element to the magnet's function.

The magnet will power a large hadron collider, which will collide ions in an attempt to reconstruct the big-bang theory, Robinson said.

The magnet will be used in order to make the hadron collider economical and practical. It is necessary to have inexpensive and high performance superconducting magnets in order for these colliders to work.

"The magnet and hadron colliders will be used for steering highly energetic particles used in high energy physics experiments to duplicate the extreme early aspects of the universe following the big bang," Robinson said. "It will be like probing the nature of matter in the universe."

Right now, hadron colliders rely on dipoles constructed of niobium-titanium alloy, but that material, though flexible, cannot withstand pressures of over 10 tesla. Current conventional electromagnets cannot attain a strength higher than 2 tesla and cannot maintain a path of accelerating particle beams, the lab stated.

The lab also stated that the magnet is able to withstand 3 million pounds more than the combined thrust of a dozen 747 airplanes. The strength of the magnet is impressive, Robinson said.

"Let's just say that if this were used as a refrigerator magnet, you could hold up several refrigerators with it," he said.