FSU’s MagLab Open House
March 29, 2025 10:39am
Florida State University is home to The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, the largest and highest-powered magnet laboratory in the world and the only facility of its kind in the western hemisphere.
On the last Saturday of every February, MagLab holds an Open House where the public can explore the magnet lab, view demonstrations, engage in hands-on activities, and meet the scientists and researchers who are on the forefront of physics research.
The Open House event features classic MagLab demonstrations like the Quarter Shrinker (I'm holding two quarters in the above photo; one has been shrunken to the size of a dime), the potato launcher, cryo flowers, junkyard magnet, and ice cream frozen with liquid nitrogen. You can see a video of the quarter shrinker in action here.
Every year, more than a thousand scientists from dozens of countries visit FSU's MagLab to use the unique magnets in research projects probing fundamental questions about materials, energy, and life. Their findings result in more than 400 scientific publications a year in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters.
Its staff of about 400 includes more than 120 Ph.D. scientists and professional engineers. The laboratory's 330,000 square foot workspace hosts the world's highest powered facility with an extremely quiet 40 megawatt power supply. The NHMFL houses some of the world's highest field magnets that have been designed and advanced by an in-house engineering group. The continuous field magnet systems include resistive, superconducting, and hybrid magnets. Resistive magnets with fields up to 33.1±0.2 Tesla (or 36.1 Tesla using Holmium flux concentrator pole pieces) are available in a 32mm bore, NMR magnets with high homogeniety to 24.6 Tesla (~1Ghz), and pulsed field magnets to 63.3 Tesla in 10ms pulses. Those are all world record superlatives that the MagLab keeps breaking with new design advances. I admit I don't know what those technical terms mean, but that's what the MagLab's publications cite.
The laboratory has a strong and active research program in Condensed Matter Physics, in both theory and experiment, and is headed by NHMFL Chief Scientist and Nobel Laureate J. Robert Schrieffer. The in-house faculty, postdoctoral, and graduate students collectively research high temperature superconductivity, organic conductors, heavy fermions, quantum Hall effect, metal-insulator transitions, magnetic superlattices, and colossal magnetoresistance. I don't know what most of those terms mean either.
What I do know is that the Open House was fun and interesting. While there, I interviewed Kathleen Amm (MagLab Director), Kristen Roberts (Public Affairs Director), Dr. Scott Hannahs (Director for Scientific Instrumentation and Operations), and Dr. Tak Kametani (Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering). Those interviews aired on my radio show today and are now archived online as a podcast at www.TheMikeBatesShow.com/podcasts/250329