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There are only a few laboratories in the world where high magnetic field research can be performed.
The European Magnetic Field Laboratory is the only place in Europe.
The LNCMI, based in both Toulouse and Grenoble, is one of the three founding members of the EMFL.
The Toulouse site has been generating pulsed fields since its creation in the early sixties
within the French National Institute of Applied Sciences.
We use the high magnetic fields as a magnifying glass, which helps us to understand the properties of certain interesting materials.
We take a sample and then we put it in something which we call 'probe'.
This is usually a long stick which is equipped with different kinds of measuring tools. And then the probe goes into the cryostat.
So the cryostat is placed in the magnet and the sample is really placed in the center of the magnetic field
and it's cold due to the surrounding of liquid helium.
The sample has to be cold because there is a lot of very interesting physics which occurs only at low temperature.
Any material can be explored in a magnetic field.
High magnetic fields can be used in many different fields, for example fundamental physics, applied physics, chemistry and biology.
Here in Toulouse we do pulsed magnetic fields, which ask for a rather large amount of power.
We release our energy in a few milliseconds.
During a pulse, the magnet undergoes a temperature change of roughly 200 degrees.
That's why we put it in liquid nitrogen to cool it down after the pulse.
We have different types of magnets in Toulouse. The strongest conventional fields go up to 80 Tesla.
That would compare to almost 30 tons on one square centimeter.
We also operate the Megagauss generator that can generate fields of the order of 200 Tesla.
The price to pay for this, is that the coil explodes each time and that we have to make measurements within only a few microseconds.
We have about 20 engineers and technicians and 15 researchers.
Of course we also hosting a large number of researchers from all over the world, who come here to do experiments.
We really expect that the collaboration of so many scientists, engineers and technicians
on a European level will permit us to do better research.
Researchers always need stronger and stronger fields to do their work. We are all the time trying to improve the facility.
It is very special equipment we cannot buy in the marketplace.
We have to make everything ourselves: the magnets, the wires and the instruments.
And by making it ourselves, we understand completely what's inside.
What we do here is fundamental research. When we make our experiments, we do not always know what we will find.
However when we find something, sometimes we are opening doors to new horizons.