In college I worked at two labs that did experiments with high magnetic fields. The first lab was very cool because the setup there used a 50-90 Tesla range and

In college I worked at two labs that did experiments with high magnetic fields. The first lab was very cool because the setup there used a 50-90 Tesla range and home made magnets along with a bank of capacitors they size of about six water coolers to pulse the magnets. The magnets themselves would melt pretty quickly but not before producing some spectacular results. The samples was cooled using a Helium-3 closed loop system that brought the temperature down to something like 0.4 K. The professor told me that if he put the magnet down with the axis in the vertical direction and pulsed it with an iron nail standing under the magnet that the nail would reach escape velocity and never come back down to earth. I don’t know if he ever actually attempted that experiment but IIRC the math checked out. The second lab where I worked used regular Helium (4 K temps) and only 5 T magnets to perform slow NMR measurements. We had a partnership with the chemistry department and the overall goal of the project was to grow a crystal that was able to become opaque or transparent by using a magnetic field at room temperatures. The idea was that with a crystal like that you could do signal switching for fiber optic networks without having to convert the signal from optical to electric and back, thus greatly increasing network speeds. The effort at the time was 50 years in the making and no solution was discovered yet but it was fun to grow my own crystals and see how they responded to sweeps of the magnetic field, movement in a constant field, and temperature changes. I also got to learn Origin C, a peculiar variant of C used by a statistical package the lab employed, played with a lot of liquid Nitrogen (great for cleaning dusty floors!), programmed a crystal growing box/PID controller, and even though I was only an undergrad, because it was a small department and lab I got to write a thesis and both the physics and chemistry departments gathered to see me present it (I was the only physics grad in my year despite a dozen the year before and after). The crux of the thesis was a new term we called “spin freezing”. But the best part of the whole thing was when I was picking out the labs. Every professor had a pitch for why his research was the most exciting but the lab I spent the most time with told me “when I was your age I also went shopping for labs like you are and one of the professors told me he was studying quantum magnetism. So I thought to myself ‘that sounds like something that could impress girls at bars’ so I went to work there.” That reasoning made a lot of sense to me so I signed up for his lab right there and then.