One tesla is equal to one weber per square metre. The unit was announced during the General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1960 and is named[1] in honour of Serbian-American electrical and mechanical engineer Nikola Tesla, upon the proposal of the Slovenian electrical engineer France Avčin.
A particle, carrying a charge of one coulomb (C), and moving perpendicularly through a magnetic field of one tesla, at a speed of one metre per second (m/s), experiences a force with magnitude one newton (N), according to the Lorentz force law. That is,
Additional equivalences result from the derivation of coulombs from amperes (A), :
the relationship between newtons and joules (J), :
and the derivation of the weber from volts (V), :
The tesla is named after Nikola Tesla. As with every SI unit named for a person, its symbol starts with an upper case letter (T), but when written in full it follows the rules for capitalisation of a common noun; i.e., "tesla" becomes capitalised at the beginning of a sentence and in titles, but is otherwise in lower case.
Electric vs. magnetic field
In the production of the Lorentz force, the difference between electric fields and magnetic fields is that a force from a magnetic field on a charged particle is generally due to the charged particle's movement,[3] while the force imparted by an electric field on a charged particle is not due to the charged particle's movement. This may be appreciated by looking at the units for each. The unit of electric field in the MKS system of units is newtons per coulomb, N/C, while the magnetic field (in teslas) can be written as N/(C⋅m/s). The dividing factor between the two types of field is metres per second (m/s), which is velocity. This relationship immediately highlights the fact that whether a static electromagnetic field is seen as purely magnetic, or purely electric, or some combination of these, is dependent upon one's reference frame (that is, one's velocity relative to the field).[4][5]
In ferromagnets, the movement creating the magnetic field is the electron spin[6] (and to a lesser extent electron orbital angular momentum). In a current-carrying wire (electromagnets) the movement is due to electrons moving through the wire (whether the wire is straight or circular).
11.75 T – the strength of INUMAC magnets, largest MRI scanner[13]
13 T – strength of the superconducting ITER magnet system[14]
14.5 T – highest magnetic field strength ever recorded for an accelerator steering magnet at Fermilab[15]
16 T – magnetic field strength required to levitate a frog[16] (by diamagnetic levitation of the water in its body tissues) according to the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics[17]
17.6 T – strongest field trapped in a superconductor in a lab as of July 2014[18]