Medicine · In service today
MRI
Most scanners are superconducting magnets. More than 30,000 are installed.
The record behind MRI
Niobium-titanium and affordable MRI · Physics in PerspectiveSuperconductors in MRI
An MRI image is built by holding a very uniform, very stable magnetic field across a person for minutes at a time. A resistive magnet strong enough would dissipate megawatts and drift with its own heating. A superconducting coil, once charged, is a closed loop with no resistance in it: the current keeps running, the field holds, and the electricity bill is the cooling rather than the field. That is the whole argument, and it is why MRI is the one place a superconductor is already a commodity rather than a research result.
What is stopping MRI
Helium. The magnet is cheap next to the cryogenics and the siting rules that a bath of liquid helium brings with it, and a quench vents it. Every serious attempt to make MRI cheaper or more portable is aimed at the cryogen rather than at the field. So the conductor to watch here is not the one with the highest transition temperature. It is the one that runs without a bath.
What a better material would change for MRI
A conductor that made this field at liquid-nitrogen temperature, or at one a single-stage cryocooler reaches, would take helium out of the argument entirely. What that changes is not image quality. It is where a scanner can be installed, who can afford to run one, and whether a hospital in a country with no helium supply chain can have one at all.
Conductors used in MRI
Near MRI, in medicine
SuperMatics is a platform infrastructure company for superconducting devices: software that finds the material and the process, lab work that makes and measures it, and pilot manufacturing with industrial partners.If you are working on something in this field and a material is what stands in the way, tell us about it.