Two magnet labs achieved new highs in pulsed-field strengths this past summer. In June the Dresden High Magnetic Field Laboratory (HLD) in Germany created a 91.4-tesla field. That was topped in August by the Los Alamos branch of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL), with 97.4 T; in the coming months Los Alamos National Laboratory expects to boost the highest field it offers users from 85 T to 92 T.
“The first 100-T projects were advertised 20 years ago,” says Oliver Portugall, technical director of the National Pulsed Magnetic Field Laboratory in Toulouse, France. “But somehow nobody was capable of getting much beyond 70 T or 80 T until recently. A 5-T increase is quite significant. Higher fields open new horizons for fundamental research.”
At the Toulouse lab, the maximum field is 70 T, but “we are currently upgrading our installation in order to keep up with Dresden and...
