This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Magnetic fields are invisible yet essential components in technologies ranging from MRI scanners and particle accelerators to atomic clocks and future quantum computers. Each of these applications requires magnetic fields with specific shapes and properties.
Today, creating such tailored magnetic fields requires researchers and engineers to design specialized, carefully optimized magnets or large systems of coils for each individual application—a complex and resource-intensive process. Now, a team of physicists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and Chalmers University of Technology has developed a method that makes it possible to transform the magnetic field from a single source, such as a coil or a permanent magnet, into a broad class of predetermined magnetic fields with exact mathematical precision. Known as magnetic omniconversion, the method enables simple magnetic sources to be used for a wide range of important applications.
The research is published in the journal Science Advances. "This is a universal method that removes previous limitations on how accurately an existing magnetic field can be transformed into another one," says Witlef Wieczorek, professor of quantum technology at Chalmers University of Technology and one of the study's co-authors. Creating magnetic fields with a specific shape, such as uniform or quadrupolar fields, typically requires custom-built magnets or advanced coil systems carefully optimized for a particular purpose.
"Using combinations of coils, it is possible to approximate a desired magnetic field to high precision, but with magnetic omniconversion the field generated is mathematically exact," explains Fabian Resare, a Ph.D. student in quantum technology at Chalmers and co-author of the study. The researchers' magnetic omniconversion acts as a kind of magnetic sculptor. By combining materials that either attract or repel magnetic fields, such as ferromagnetic and superconducting materials, they can steer and reshape a magnetic field into exactly the desired form.
When these materials are arranged in a carefully calculated geometry, they determine how the magnetic field is distributed in space. In this way, the researchers can effectively transform the field from a simple source into almost any other magnetic field with high precision. To demonstrate the method experimentally, the researchers built a prototype capable of transforming the nonuniform magnetic field from a simple coil into an almost perfectly uniform magnetic field.
The device consisted of a superconducting aluminum tube and cast-iron components, which were manufactured by Lars Jönsson from the mechanical workshop at the Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience. When the device was cooled to temperatures below 1 kelvin, close to absolute zero, the measurements showed that the magnetic field inside the device closely matched the researchers' calculations, providing an important experimental proof of concept. The team has filed a patent application for the technology and hopes the method will find practical applications in society and research.
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