Magnetic levitation for hard superconductors

An approach for calculating the interaction between a hard superconductor and a permanent magnet in the field-cooled case is proposed The exact solutions were obtained for the point magnetic dipole over a flat ideally hard superconductor. We have shown that such an approach is adaptable to a wide practical range of melt-textured high-temperature superconductors' systems with magnetic levitation. In this case, the energy losses can be calculated from the alternating magnetic field distribution on the superconducting sample surface. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics.