Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Pulsés CNRS – INSA

General overview
Short history
The Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Pulsés (LNCMP UMR5147) was created on
1/1/2003 as a mixed research laboratory jointly operated and funded by the Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Université Paul Sabatier (UPS) and the Institut National des
Sciences Appliquées (INSA) de Toulouse. Before that, it has existed as a mixed service unit, the
Service National des Champs Magnétiques Pulsés (SNCMP, UMS5642) which was housed on the
INSA campus until 2000, when it moved to a new building on the UPS campus, at the same time
upgrading its capacitor bank to 14 MJ. The LNCMP ceased to exist on 1/1/2009, as at that date, the
Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses (LNCMI, UPR3228) was created through the
merger of the Laboratoire des Champs Magnétiques Intenses (LCMI UPR5021 in Grenoble) and the
LNCMP, as part of the Très Grands Instruments de la Recherche (TGIR) of the CNRS.
Missions
The LNCMP has three major missions;
1) High quality research using high magnetic fields:
The scientists of the laboratory develop their own research in the main domains of solid state physics:
semiconductors, metals and superconductors or magnetism where the quantum effects are studied.
This 2005-2009 report presents the main developments of this research and of the technical
improvements underpinning them. Since the LNCMP scientists also work as local contacts for visiting
scientists, the number of topics studied at the LNCMP is necessarily large compared to the number of
scientists, which is a inherent aspect of the operation of any user facility.
2) Providing access to external users:
The laboratory is open to the international scientific community. Any scientist wanting to use high
pulsed magnetic fields can submit a project to use the relevant infrastructure of the laboratory with the
help of the general support group of the laboratory and of a local contact.
All projects, including the internal ones, to be realized in high magnetic fields are evaluated by an
international committee twice a year (June and December). Among around 70 projects submitted per
year, the rejection or reduction of demanded time is around 15%, the total number of submitted French
projects being around 30 (45 %).
3) Magnet development:
The laboratory has to develop and provide pulsed magnetic fields with the best possible performance
for high quality scientific experiments. This can be in terms of the field strength, but also in terms of
field homogeneity and stability, high repetition rate or by offering special magnet geometries. These
are in general conflicting requirements and the optimal choice depends on the experiments to be
performed. The developments in magnet technology allow us to remain competitive with facilities
abroad and open our activities to other scientific domains, like pulsed field NMR, and other disciplines
than physics.
Why high magnetic fields?
A magnetic field is a very powerful thermodynamic parameter to influence the state of any material
system. Consequently magnetic fields serve as an experimental tool in very diverse research areas like
condensed matter physics, molecular physics, chemistry and, with increasing importance, in biology.
The versatility and universality of magnetic fields as a research tool lies in their coupling to the charge
and spin of the particles that constitute the matter that surrounds us. Many magnetic field based
research techniques are standard and can be done with conventional commercially available magnets
and associated equipment (MRI-scanners, NMR and ESR spectrometers, conventional
superconducting magnets, etc.). On the other hand there are many cases where very high magnetic
fields, only available in a few specialized facilities, are essential and where the prospect of new
discoveries is often the greatest. This scientific motivation has always formed a strong drive to
develop techniques and installations to generate the highest possible magnetic fields and to perform
experiments with them. In recent surveys, both by the European Science Foundation (ESF, "The
Scientific Case for a European Laboratory for 100T Science", 1998) and by the USA National
3