Day o' Videos: Presentation and Flying Superconductors

The lab book today was a bit sparse and a bit dry. This is a bit odd considering I got to play lab yesterday... You'll see.

First, here's an archival video of the presentation I did last Sunday for the TX APS section meeting here in College Station. I fumble a few times, but the content is all there. If you have any questions, they are very, very welcome!

The second video has some kind of cool stuff in it. Not stuff that went the way I had hoped mind you, but cool nonetheless. Here's the deal; we'd hoped to make a spiffy little superconductor visibly quenching video. The idea was to suspend a superconductor as a pendulum in a magnetic field. It was hoped that as the field increased, the superconductor would swing away from the pole of the magnet, (it did), and that as the field increased more, the superconductor would quench and fall from it's suspended state, (it didn't). Our melt-texture growth superconductor from CAN just won't quench in 12.8 kG fields. We already knew that. Our next hope was to go with a low quality superconductor which should have quenched at a lower field strength. I didn't consider the fact that quality also affects the force available for superconductor levitaiton, and so the lower quality superconductor did absolutely nothing.

In any event, it was educational and fun to watch the high quality superconductor as the field was ramped up. Here's what you'll see. As the field between the magnet poles is increased, the cylindrical superconductor which must have frozen in a bit of residual field when it was cooled will first orient it's magnetic moment perpendicular to the field to minimize the torque it feels. As the field strength is increased, the superconductor will then begin to move itself out of the magnet altogether eventually swinging off the screen. You'll also catch the odd snippet of extraneous lab conversations.

Picture of the Day:
New Mexico Mountains

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