The Magnet Lab at Los Alamos National Laboratory (New Mexico)

Science Focus

Los Alamos National Laboratory is home to the Magnet Lab's Pulsed Field user program, the first and only high pulsed field user facility in the United States. It is located within the center of the national laboratory, in the specially designed Experimental Hall (see map).

These magnets are incredibly powerful tools, reaching fields much stronger than those possible in the continuous field magnets located at the Magnet Lab's Tallahassee and Gainesville sites. These incredible fields can only be sustained, however, for a few seconds or fractions of a second.

Key Facilities

Staff from the Magnet Lab's Los Alamos site with the 100-tesla multi-shot magnet.

The Pulsed Field Facility houses both semi-destructive and non-destructive magnets. This collection includes the most powerful non-destructive magnet in the world, a 100-tesla multi-shot magnet jointly developed by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. (A tesla is a measure of magnetic field strength. The Earth's magnetic field is one twenty thousandth of a tesla.) Commissioned in October 2006, this magnet is available for use by scientists and engineers for fields up to 90 T; designers continue to work to increase its field to 100 T as they gain operational experience. This tool will allow researchers to explore new extremes of low temperature and high magnetic field, leading to new insights into the mechanism of superconductivity, magnetic field-induced phase transitions, and so-called quantum critical points, in which small changes in materials properties at very low temperature have dramatic effects on physical behavior.

Among the facility's magnets are:

• 50-tesla mid pulse (300 millisecond pulse)
• 50-tesla short pulse (35 millisecond pulse)
• 65-tesla short pulse (35 millisecond pulse)
• 60-tesla short pulse (35 millisecond pulse)
• 60-tesla short pulse (35 millisecond pulse)
• 300-tesla single turn magnet system (6 microsecond pulse) (in this type of system, the magnet is destroyed by explosives during operation, but the sample is preserved)
• 100-tesla multi-shot (15 millisecond pulse)
• 60-tesla long pulse (2 second controlled waveform pulse)
• 20-tesla superconducting magnet (static field)
• 17-tesla superconducting magnet (static field)

Tremendous amounts of electricity are needed to operate this arsenal of powerful magnets. The Los Alamos facility has a $30 million pulsed power infrastructure that includes a 1.43 gigawatt motor generator, five 64-megawatt power supplies and a 1200-ton motor generator. The generator, with its 4800-ton inertia block, rests on 60 springs to minimize earth tremors when the generator is suddenly decelerated to power the magnet.

Related Links

• Travel to Los Alamos
• The Magnet Lab at Florida State University (Tallahassee)
• The Magnet Lab at the University of Florida (Gainesville)

For more information contact Jonathan Betts, Head of the Pulsed Field Facility Users Program, or Chuck Mielke, Interim Director of the Pulsed Field Facility.