Some Contemporary and Prospective Applications of High Temperature Superconductors

Abstract

High temperature superconductors (HTS) have a wide range of very sensitive and reliable advanced technological applications. In this chapter, some examples of contemporary and prospective usage of the superconductors such as in vivo living body measurements in medicine, terahertz equipments for security systems, quantum bit namely “qubit” applications in quantum computation and bolometers for some space investigations will be dealt with. Especially in medicine, superconductors have been reliably utilized in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and magnetocardiography (MCG) for both analysis of magnetic activity of different regions of the human body such as brain and heart’s wave activities and very early diagnosis of several diseases. All equipments mentioned above contain Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID), which is based on the Josephson Effect. SQUID is a very sensitive magnetic detector to determine the change of the magnetic flux in material media of the order of 10-15 T兼態, which coincides with the order of magnetic flux quanta, Φ待 = に.どはばぱ捲など貸怠泰 劇兼態. The sensitivity of SQUID is revealed easily by remembering the fact that the magnetic field of the Earth equals to 5x10-5 Tesla. Besides these contemporary applications in medicine mentioned above, the Proton-MRS (PMRS) measurements will be proposed for forensic science investigations as one of the prospective implementations of HTS’s. Because of the fact that some in vivo investigations via P-MRS provide the facility to detect the minor changes of metabolites in human brain (Onbasli et al., 1999), the method, which enables to detect the mild head injuries, which cannot be recognized according to Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) (Teasdale & Jennett, 1974) from the neurological point of view, will be presented in this chapter. Moreover, one of the remarkable features of HTS is that some oxide layered HTS work as a terahertz wave source. From this point of view, HTS‘s are also utilized in security systems, in remote sensing and non-destructive diagnosis. As was previously determined that the