To be quite frank, I haven't thought all that much about magnet technology, I always got what I needed from straight up 1D NMR at around 360 MHz, and my interaction with the magnets was basically being annoyed with myself to no end when I forgot to take my wallet out of my pocket when loading the sample, which demagnetized all of my credit cards and ATM cards.
I have sort of lazily assumed that the most powerful magnets were all superconducting, and your links and discussion made me realize that I was missing quite a bit, particularly knowing about Francis Bitter.
For NMR, I can't say I've ever been particularly involved in 2D experiments like COSEY, NOESY, etc.
I'm an old guy.
I had some peripheral interest in magic angle spinning when I was in school in connection with the time scales of non-classical carbocations, but I never went in any deeper other than to say I've been there.
Last summer my son got to visit the NMR facility at the Sorbonne, where, during a tour conducted by Christel Gervais he was exposed to lots of solid state heteronuclear stuff; apparently there's a lot going on with that involved in an interesting new take on ceramics, specifically polymer derived ceramics, to manipulate these concepts to highly ordered nanostructures. He didn't get to submit any samples there, however. Apparently there's a lot of magic angle spinning stuff involved with that. (I really should read some of Dr. Gervais' papers, but there is so much to learn and so little time left in my life.)
I do attend lectures at PPPL every winter for the wonderful "Science on Saturday" series, and always one or two talks are marketing for fusion.
Although I'm a fission kind of guy; I would like to see fusion work; if only to have access to those high energy neutrons that surely can do a lot of fun things that would be useful to humanity. One fact that always troubled me about fusion was the reliance on superconducting magnets, and the requirement that we have some of the coldest stuff on earth, liquid helium, in close proximity to some of the hottest stuff on earth, a fusion plasma, with no real avenue to control the direction of those high energy neutrons.
Thus the most exciting thing in this paper in the OP for me was to read about the "high temperature" superconducting magnets, which makes superconductivity viable at liquid nitrogen temperatures.
That, I think, is a big deal; and the fusion people, I hope, have looked at this paper.
Helium is not a renewable resource, and we are going to run out of it, and although a fusion reactor would be making some, and we can get helium-3 from tritium, we're talking gram scales, not ton scales, because of the extraordinarily high energy density of fusion plasmas, even in comparison to fission nuclei.
Thanks again for the illuminating comment.
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