Video: Supercooled Levitating Hoverboard Lets Students Glide on Air
Hey kid, I just need to borrow your... hover board?!
IMAGE BY CNET
You probably saw that super viral quantum locking levitation video that bounced all over the Web last week, in which a team of researchers plays with some liquid nitrogen, a small superconducting disc, and some strange quantum phenomenon that makes the disc hover above a magnet, no strings attached (well, technically, tubes, but no matter). This week's levitation vid also taps the Meisnner effect (with a few differences to the disc video) to achieve this kind of levitation at a decidedly cooler scale: that of the hoverboard.
MagSurf, build by researchers at Universite Paris Diderot in France, flips the strange world of the quantum into a more sci-fi application, essentially turning a skateboard like platform into one big magnetic superconductor. Using liquid nitrogen, the team turn the platform super-cold, creating an electromagnetic field that is expelled from the inside of the board. It's not quantum locking - the skateboard is too big and doesn't have the kinds of imperfections in the material to create the vertex pinning effect seen in that little super-cooled disc - but it provides enough outward magnetic force to float above a rail of permanent magnets.
It's sort of like a Maglev train, and sort of not. But, says SmartPlanet, one group of researchers in Japan is reportedly working on scaling exactly this kind of technology into better levitating train tech. That sounds somewhat difficult, given the extremely low temperatures needed to make this kind of thing work. They're behind schedule as it is - they need to have a child friendly salable model by 2015, or the universe will collapse in on itself or something.
For your enjoyment, the quantum locking video - which is really cool if you haven't seen it - is below.
[SmartPlanet]