Concerning superconducting inertial guidance gyroscopes inside superconducting magnetic shields
- Department of Physics, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (United States)
Superconductors can in theory be used to detect rotation by Josephson interference or by detection of the London field, a magnetic induction that fills the interior of any rotating bulk superconductor. One might hope to use these properties of superconductors to build a practical inertial guidance gyroscope. A problem arises from the necessity of surrounding the device with superconducting magnetic shielding: the London field generated by a co-rotating shield eliminates the response of the superconducting device within the shield. The present article demonstrates this point more rigorously than has been done before, discussing solutions of Ampere`s law for rotating and nonrotating superconductors and paying careful attention to boundary conditions. Beginning with a supercurrent density derivable from either the Ginzburg-Landau or the London theory of superconductivity, the article shows: (1) that a superconducting device cannot distinguish between rotation and an applied magnetic field; (2) that a superconducting device surrounded by a co-rotating superconducting shield cannot detect rotation. The term `superconducting gyroscope` in this article refers only to a device whose working principle is the response of the superconductor itself to rotation, not to any device in which superconducting electronic components are used to detect some other effect. {copyright} {ital 1997 American Institute of Physics.}
- OSTI ID:
- 564878
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 82, Issue 11; Other Information: PBD: Dec 1997
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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