Inductive method to measure very small joint resistances of superconducting wires

In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is currently being developed at CERN, about 50,000 connections of superconducting wire will be necessary to implement all circuits for powering 6000 corrector magnets with a maximum current of 600 A. To minimise the generation of ohmic heat in the cryogenic system, it is necessary to reduce the contact resistance of these connections as much as possible. This paper describes a method to measure contact resistances of splices of superconducting wires, which has been used to optimise such connections. Additionally we present results of a number of measurements on different types of connections. (2 refs)