A pulsed magnet at Los Alamos National Laboratory exceeded the coveted 100-tesla mark on 22 March. “This is our Moon shot. We’ve worked toward this for a decade and a half,” says Charles Mielke, director of the pulsed branch of the US National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
Last summer the Los Alamos facility achieved 97.4 T (see PHYSICS TODAY, November 2011, page 25). The new high was reached by changing the waveform of the input current, says Mielke.
Higher fields have been reached, but only in magnets that self-destruct in the process. Strong magnetic fields are used to probe, for example, superconducting materials, topological insulators, and the quantum behavior of phase transitions in solids.
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