More Flux

Few things make the director of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory wince more than hearing the lab described as, "FSU's Magnet Lab."

It's not that Greg Boebinger doesn't love and appreciate The Florida State University. Of course he does; heck, he's a faculty member, as are many of the other scientists who work at the lab. He just prefers to hear, "The Magnet Lab at FSU."

Why such apparent semantics? It might come as a surprise to many readers, but FSU, the University of Florida and Los Alamos National Laboratory jointly operate the Magnet Lab for the National Science Foundation, with sites at each of those locations.

The FSU branch is the lab's headquarters, and at 370,000 square feet, it is by far the largest facility and home to four of the lab's seven user programs, as well as the Applied Superconductivity Center. FSU, as the signatory of the NSF agreement that established the lab, is responsible for establishing and maintaining administrative and financial oversight of the lab, and ensuring that the operations are in line with the objectives outlined in the NSF agreement.

Though the lab's three branches all make high field research possible, the magnets they utilize can be very different. This photo illustration shows the different kinds of magnet technology in place, from pulsed magnet coils (far right) to cable-in-conduit conductor (lower left) to the traditional resistive magnets coil (top rear). Click for larger image.

How did it get to be this way? The tale begins in the late 1980s, when a small group of leaders from different corners of the country crafted a vision for a premier research facility that would build and operate the world's most powerful magnets. Jack Crow of FSU, Don Parkin of Los Alamos in New Mexico and Neil Sullivan of the University of Florida co-developed the proposal for this new entity, to be operated collaboratively by the three institutions and headquartered near FSU.

They secured the backing of key Florida officials and submitted their proposal to the National Science Foundation in 1989. In so doing, the team challenged the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, home to the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory, founded a quarter of a century earlier.

This is the perfect spot to introduce one of the other things that makes Boebinger wince: When people say (some quite proudly) that FSU "stole" the Magnet Lab from MIT.

No, FSU's Crow and his partners did not "steal" the Magnet Lab from MIT; they earned it following a stringent peer-review competition, following which the National Science Board awarded the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory to consortium that included FSU.

Still, why are there three sites?

High field magnets are very specialized instruments with very specific research capabilities. The higher the magnetic field, the more power needed to operate them. Los Alamos National Lab was home to a 1.4-gigawatt generator, just the thing needed to build up a very high field pulsed-magnet program. UF was home to the Microkelvin Lab, a facility that coupled high magnetic fields with extremely low temperatures, and a first-rate magnetic resonance imaging research facility. And FSU was aggressively building up its materials science and condensed matter physics research programs, providing three new buildings and the means to hire the research scientists needed for the Magnet Lab's future headquarters. The three partners' combined expertise and support from the state of Florida proved irresistible, and to this day, no other country in the world offers this combination of research capabilities in one organization.