NSF Award
2408453
This project will develop special research magnets that will create some of the highest magnetic fields on earth. These high magnetic fields will help scientists understand how magnetism and superconductivity work at the atomic level, and how to make new functional materials that rely on these properties. The development work will include training at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoc level. These students will be exposed to complex instrumentation in their home laboratory and at national laboratories where they will be exposed to high level science. New superconducting systems seem to be discovered every few years, and advances in magnetism show no signs of stopping. Developing these proposed research magnets will accelerate discoveries in new materials with magnetic and superconducting properties. Fundamental physics discoveries involving magnetism have led to the rapid miniaturization of everything from earbuds to hard drives. Advances in superconducting materials and magnets have transformed medical imaging, and are at the heart of most successful quantum computers. The use of magnetic and superconducting materials to improve our electric grid, electric motors, and appliances is widely anticipated, but depends on the continued advancement of our understanding of materials with both magnetic and superconducting properties. <br/><br/><br/>High magnetic fields and low temperatures are essential to understanding quantum states of matter, the states of matter that give us technologies such as superconductivity, magnetism, and quantum computers. This development proposal will create pulsed magnets in the range of 30 - 50 tesla that will greatly increase the throughput of high magnetic field research laboratories and create magnets that can be used at light sources such as X-ray laboratories. Low temperatures are essential to lower the energy of a system so that the interactions between electrons dominate the physics of materials. Electrons are intrinsically magnetic, so magnetic fields are a natural probe of electron behavior. Given the energy scales of temperature and how an electron interacts with a magnetic field, 10 kelvin is about equal to 15 tesla. Therefore, to study materials, many quantum phenomena require magnetic fields on the order of tens of tesla. The goal of this project is to create a magnet that can be pulsed to 40 tesla once a minute, or 50 tesla every five minutes thus increasing the repetition rate of magnet pulses by a factor of four, greatly increasing the number of experiments that can be done at the university based laboratory. These designs will be applicable to many other pulsed field laboratories, and in particular for the Argonne National laboratory X-ray beam line. The researchers will design a magnet that could be used in the beam line at Advanced Photon Source. Additionally, this research will train scientists at the level of undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdocs. These students and postdocs will be directly involved in experiments at our university and national laboratories, preparing them to be the next generation of senior research scientists at leading US research institutions.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
