Ada Genavia
Mar 23, 2012

Magnetic field researchers target hundred-Tesla goal

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s biggest magnet facility today met the grand challenge of producing magnetic fields in excess of 100 tesla while conducting six different experiments. The hundred-tesla  level is roughly equivalent to 2 million times Earth’s magnetic field. The science expected to come out varies with the experiment, but can be summarized as Quantum Phase transitions, new ultra high field magnetic states, electronic structure determination and topologically protected states of matter. Chuck Mielke, director of the Pulsed Field Facility at Los Alamos, states that the new magnet has allowed users and staff to pin down the upper critical field of a new form of superconductor, observe magneto-quantum oscillations in a high temperature superconductor to unprecedented resolution, determine a topological state of a new material, and discover a new form of magnetic ordering in an advanced magnetic material. The ability to create pulses of extremely high magnetic fields nondestructively provides researchers with an unprecedented tool for studying a range of scientific questions: from how materials behave under the influence of very high magnetic fields, to research into the quantum behavior of phase transitions in solids.

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