High-Magnetic-Field Research and Facilities: [Final Report] (1979)

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APPENDIX A: Letter to the Scientific Community Dear - I have been asked to chair a committee of a panel reporting to the National Research Council investigating opportunities for research given some major new facilities to generate high magnetic fields. The impetus behind the study is the suspicion that a large portion of the scientific community in the United States would be very interested in doing research, given the availability (and accessibility) of a facility (or facilities) capable of producing 1) 750 kilogauss (c.w.) 2) "Static" pulse operation to approximately 1.5 megagauss, with con- stant fields for 10-100 milliseconds. 3) Pulse operation to 10 megagauss (non-destructive) for times in the microsecond range. 4) Very short (probably destructive) pulse operation to 100 megagauss (for nanoseconds?). using high magnetic fields. Clearly, a substantial national investment would be involved. In order to determine whether such an investment makes sense, our committee is investigating the scientific prospects should such facilities exist. I am writing you to ask if you could help us. If you had at your disposal fields of the sort described above, what experiments important to your field of research could you do? We would be interested in every category, but if a new area of opportunity would open up we'd like to know about it. Could you take some time and think of what you might be able to do, or what 94

High-Magnetic-Field Facilities and Users 93 users, the assembling and dismantling of equipment can lead to substantial inconvenience for a large number of users. The addition of more "popular" magnets and magnet stations could partially alleviate this problem. In addition to the routine equipment and consumable materials (cryogenic fluids, for example) that are generally provided by high-field facilities, the availability of certain specialized equipment that is either too sensitive or too large to be transported easily would make high-field facilities more generally useful and might attract scientists who, for reasons of logistics and equipment problems, have had to limit their use to the lower fields provided by super- conducting magnets. Some examples of such specialized equipment are general support facilities for chemistry, ultrahigh vacuum chambers and heat pumps for chemistry experiments, a complete range (submillimeter to ultra- violet) of lasers (including dye lasers), spectrometers and detectors (with appropriate optical components and hardware), pulsed lasers with associated detectors and signal-processing electronics (particularly useful for short-pulse magnet systems), signal averagers, and digital acquisition and data-processing equipment. On a somewhat larger scale, facilities such as ESR and NMR spectrometers and very-low-temperature cryogenic facilities (dilution refrigerators) would be very useful in relation to some of the scientific opportunities discussed in Chapter 3. Much of this equipment is commercially available, but some of the very specialized equipment, such as NMR facilities and dilution refrigerators, will only be available to and truly usable by visitors through the efforts of an active, innovative scientific staff associated with the facility.