Roughly the dimensions of a large shoebox, the NSCL-designed magnet hangs beneath testing equipment at MIT. Photo by Chen-yu Gung, of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

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EAST LANSING, Mich. — One of the more daunting obstacles in the fast-paced world of rare isotope research – designing a magnet that can handle high-radiation environments – appears to have been cleared by Michigan State University's National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory researchers, or NSCL.

Working with several collaborators in the laboratory, Jonathan DeLauter, NSCL research and development physicist, and Al Zeller, head of the NSCL research facilities department, developed a prototype superconducting magnet robust enough to be used in new, high-beam-intensity facilities. The magnet is described in the June issue of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Applied Superconductivity.

That’s a breakthrough that’s key to accelerating atomic nuclei. Accelerators, tools of the trade among nuclear scientists, are machines used to speed up atomic nuclei to hundreds of millions of miles per hour and then collide these nuclei with other atoms. These collisions create rare isotopes, fleeting bits of matter that don’t normally exist on Earth. Scientists use rare isotopes in basic and applied research, such as studying the origin of the elements and treatment of disease.

Magnets are used in accelerator facilities to filter the beam of speeding atomic nuclei. By adjusting the field generated by the magnets, researchers are able to sift the few novel, sought-after nuclei from among a riot of other particles.

In new accelerator facilities, the magnets will have to operate in intense radiation environments that would wear out even the best-insulated conventional magnets in just months. Even though scientists have known for years that magnets might be properly designed and shielded to handle high-radiation environments, a precise engineering blueprint has remained elusive.

Roughly the size of a large shoebox, the prototype magnet is only a fraction of the size of the magnets that will eventually be needed in new facilities. However, the researchers took care in selecting materials and making design choices such that, in the future, the dimensions could be increased dramatically without affecting the magnet’s overall performance.

“Everything in the magnet fabrication process can be scaled up… which is not possible for other technologies of equivalent radiation resistance,” writes DeLauter, who worked on the magnet project during his graduate studies at NSCL.

The U.S. National Science Foundation and the heavy-ion research facility Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany, provided funding for the research. Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tyco Thermal Controls made important technical contributions.

NSCL is a world-leading laboratory for rare isotope research and nuclear science education.

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