Strongest resistive magnet created with 41.4 tesla

National magnet lab reached a record of 41.4 teslas at 1:10 p.m. on Aug. 21 with a resistive magnet. It was the culmination of two and a half intense years of design and development. In so doing, the lab reclaimed the record for the world’s strongest resistive magnet, which it had held for 19 years up until 2014.

The magnet is powered by 32 megawatts of DC (direct current) power. It leapfrog over the previous record-holders, a 38.5-tesla resistive magnet in Hefei, China, and a 37.5-tesla resistive magnet in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

The lab’s 45-tesla magnet, the world’s strongest continuous-field magnet, is a hybrid instrument and one of the lab’s most sought-after tools.

The new 41.4-tesla magnet is easier for scientists to use than a hybrid and gives them more flexibility to adjust the field and polarity during experiments. The new system will be made available to visiting scientists in the coming months, joining a fleet that features a pair of 35-tesla instruments that, until this week, had been the lab’s strongest resistive magnets.