Magnets; who has not heard of them? We mainly use them to stick a drawing to the refrigerator and a car dump yard may use a giant magnet to move cars towards the crusher.

But did you know that a simple dynamo uses magnets to create electric potential? And the Large Hadron Collider at CERN uses enormous magnets to deflect particles in order to make them move in circles! Even the aurorae at the poles are an indirect result of something magnetic: the Earth’s liquid metal core.

We all know what magnets are, and what they are used for. But how can we utilise the knowledge of magnets in our favour, like the researchers at CERN do?

In this unit we will give you a physical insight into the attractiveness of magnets.

Image by Noel Bauza from Pixabay is licensed under CC0