A group of scientists at the University of Tokyo has recorded the largest magnetic field ever generated indoors—a whopping 1,200 tesla, as measured in the standard units of magnetic field strength.

By comparison, this is a field strength about 400 times higher than those generated by the huge, powerful magnets used in modern hospital MRI machines, and it is about 50 million times stronger than the Earth's own magnetic field.

Stronger magnetic fields have previously been achieved in outdoor experiments using chemical explosives, but this is a world record for magnetic fields generated indoors in a controlled manner. That greater control means the discovery could open new frontiers in solid-state physics, perhaps allowing scientists to reach what is known as the "quantum limit," a condition where all the electrons in a material are confined to the lowest ground state, where exotic quantum phenomena may appear.


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