Wyoming Lands Rare Super Magnet To Power Up Advanced Rare Earths Research

If you have lately felt a strong magnetic pull toward Laramie, it might not be all in your head. The University of Wyoming has landed one of only three super magnet devices of its kind in the United States—a room-sized contraption that can generate a magnetic field a million times stronger than Earth’s. The others are housed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Clark University in Massachusetts.

The device, now called WYPulse, takes up an entire room in the basement of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. It operates at 7,000 volts and releases an amount of energy roughly equivalent to a World War II grenade, said UW Assistant Professor Alexander Petrovic. The magnetic chamber, roughly one foot by one foot, is buried in a concrete pit lined with wood and wrapped in a metal box filled with liquid nitrogen when in use. The wood captures shrapnel if the magnet fails; the liquid nitrogen prevents meltdown.

WYPulse will allow researchers to put Wyoming’s rare earth elements through their magnetic paces in search of a kind of Holy Grail: a new superconductor that does not die in a high magnetic field. Most superconductors lose their special properties when they hit a magnetic field, like Superman running into a wall of kryptonite. “We have a few candidates around the world,” Petrovic said, “but it’s very difficult to conclusively prove the resilience of superconductivity to the magnetic field.”

The device will also help chase exotic magnetic “excitations” called skyrmions—nanoscale hurricanes of swirling electrons a few atoms wide. Longer-lived skyrmions could allow quantum computers to encode and process information with higher resilience to external noise. UW and the University of Colorado-Boulder are already working on a proposed National Science Foundation quantum infrastructure grant to create a nationally recognized facility anchored by WYPulse.

The super magnet could also boost development of sodium-ion battery technology, which uses soda ash from Wyoming’s trona industry as a key ingredient. High magnetic fields can help study defect formation and sodium mobility, potentially leading to better grid-scale energy storage.

WYPulse came to Wyoming as a gift from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. A retiring professor offered it to a colleague of Petrovic’s in France, who then asked, “Alex, do you fancy a magnet?” The device cannot be bought off the shelf; manufacturers stopped making these systems decades ago. The French colleague has also offered to host Wyoming students to teach them how to operate in high magnetic fields.

Even without advertising, Petrovic is already hearing from national and international colleagues interested in using the facility, which is expected to be completed in December. “This is another arrow in Wyoming’s quiver,” he said. “It’s a golden arrow pointed straight at a future where Wyoming plants yet another footstep inside a national arena where the country’s economic and national security are taking shape.”