Did you know magnets can disappear in cold metal?
Did you know magnets can disappear in cold metal?
Imagine you have a fridge magnet stuck to your fridge door. It's there until you unplug the fridge, but what if it vanished while the fridge is still plugged in?
Superconductors are like a magnet's opposite; they push away magnetic fields when cooled down. This is called the Meissner effect, where the superconductor acts like a perfect magnet that repels others.
Example
Picture a fridge magnet (magnetic field) on a fridge (superconductor) that's turned off (cooled below critical temperature). The magnet disappears (magnetic field expelled) even though the fridge is still plugged in (superconductor in superconducting state).
Remember this
The Meissner effect is the phenomenon where a superconductor expels a magnetic field as it transitions to a superconducting state.
Text adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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