Flux pumping Flux pumping Flux pumping is a method for magnetising superconductors to fields in excess of 15 teslas. The method can be applied to any type II superconductor and exploits a fundamental property of superconductors. That is their ability to support and maintain currents on the length scale of the superconductor. Conventional magnetic materials are magnetised on a molecular scale which means that superconductors can maintain a flux density orders of magnitude bigger than conventional materials. Flux pumping is especially significant when one bears in mind that all other methods of magnetising superconductors require application of a magnetic flux density at
Magnetic flux quantum in the superconducting phase. The magnetic field lines pass along this normal core through the whole sample. The screening currents circulate in the -vicinity of the core and screen the rest of the superconductor from the magnetic field in the core. In total, each such Abrikosov vortex carries one quantum of magnetic flux . Although theoretically, it is possible to have more than one flux quantum per hole, the Abrikosov vortices with are unstable and split into several vortices with . In a real hole the states with are stable as the real hole cannot split itself into several smaller