National High Magnetic Field Laboratory Renewal 2023-2027

High magnetic fields are a powerful tool for scientific research, and have wide spread technological applications. The most popular applications include magnetic resonance imaging for medical diagnosis, high-speed magnetic levitation trains, and power generation. Scientists use high magnetic fields to explore new physical phenomena, develop materials for future generation computers, overcome energy challenges, and increase our understanding of the human brain and life in general.

This award to Florida State University supports the operation of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) in 2023-2027. Home to many world-record magnet systems, the NHMFL is located at three sites: Florida State University, the University of Florida and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. More than one thousand six hundred scientists from academia, government laboratories, and industry around the world come to the NHMFL sites each year, and use the powerful magnets and state-of-the-art instruments for research in materials science, condensed matter physics, chemistry, biology, as well as magnet technology.

The results of this research are published in more than four hundred papers each year, and lead to the creation of start-up companies. The Magnet Science and Technology division and the Advanced Superconductivity Center at NHMFL meet the laboratory’s mission to develop new materials and to build new magnet systems to advance the frontiers of high magnetic field science.

The mission of NHMFL also includes the education and training of the next generation of scientists as well as to increase the scientific awareness of the broader scientific community. A large number of scientists, including 500 undergraduate and graduate students, 200 postdoctoral scholars, and 250 early-career scientists, use the NHMFL as their training ground.

The NHMFL reaches tens of thousands of K-12 students, teachers, and the public through classroom lessons, summer and winter camps, internships, tours, and web-based interactive tutorials and activities. An open house event organized by the scientific and technical staff at the NHMFL brings more than 10,000 members of the general public to perform hands-on experiments each year.

The NHMFL includes seven user facilities: Steady State or DC Field, Electron Magnetic Resonance, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, and Ion Cyclotron Resonance at Florida State University; Pulsed Field at Los Alamos National Laboratory; and High B/T and Advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy at the University of Florida. User access is provided through a competitive proposal review process.

Magnetic fields both probe and manipulate quantum materials through coupling to electron spins, orbitals, and currents, controlling nuclear spins, imposing commensurabilities in energy or length scales, breaking symmetries and/or inducing magnetic vortices. Scientific research at the NHMFL is primarily focused, but not limited to, on advancing our understanding along seven broad frontiers: (a) emergent behaviors that results from electronic interactions in quantum materials; (b) the role of topology in giving rise to new physics in quantum matter; (c) exploring the new physics revealed in atomically-thin materials from monolayers to multi-layers to structures with multi-layer structures with twisted interlayer orientations; (d) extracting atomic-level descriptions of complex ‒ often disordered ‒ materials, including catalysts, glasses, and batteries, using both nuclear and electron magnetic resonance; (e) using resonance techniques on metabolites, biomolecular assemblies, and living organisms to measure structure, dynamics, and development under physiological and in vivo conditions; (f) using ion cyclotron resonance to probe chemically-complex organic mixtures at a molecular level, from dissolved organic matter to anthropogenic contaminants; and (g) researching high-strength conductors and superconductors necessary to advance magnet technologies.

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.