UW installs rare 58-Tesla magnet for quantum materials research

A rare 58-Tesla magnet now sitting at the University of Wyoming in Laramie gives Albany County something far beyond a laboratory trophy: a national-scale research tool that only two other U.S. academic institutions can match. The new Wyoming Pulsed High Magnetic Field Facility, or WYPulse, could draw federal money, industry partnerships, graduate students and high-skill jobs into a city better known for campus life than for frontier physics.

The system arrived as a fully functional gift from Goethe-Universität Frankfurt in Germany and was installed as a complete experimental platform. It includes a capacitor bank, high-voltage power supply, switching systems with integrated safety devices, isolation transformers, three pulsed field coils, a liquid-nitrogen cryostat, a 4-helium bath cryostat, a 3-helium cryostat insert for ultralow-temperature experiments and a dedicated control and data-synchronization unit. UW says the setup makes it one of only three academic institutions in the United States with access to a pulsed magnet facility of this class, alongside Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Clark University in Massachusetts.

For Laramie and Albany County, the significance lies in what the magnet lets researchers do here instead of somewhere else. Fields above 50 Tesla are needed to suppress superconductivity, expose hidden electronic phases, trigger quantum phase transitions and probe exotic states that standard lab magnets cannot reach. That gives UW an edge in quantum materials, advanced materials, critical minerals, rare-earth magnetics and other work tied to energy and defense priorities.

The magnet will be housed inside UW’s Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering, or C-QISE, which was established in August 2023 and focuses on quantum materials and devices, quantum characterization, quantum simulation and quantum algorithms. University leaders have framed the installation as a way to elevate Wyoming into a national research destination at a time when the university has already earned Carnegie R1 research status.

That broader research push also connects to the School of Energy Resources, created in 2006 to advance energy-related education, research and outreach. The new magnet gives that mission a sharper technical edge, especially as Wyoming looks for ways to turn its critical minerals and rare-earth resources into higher-value economic activity rather than raw extraction alone.

The university’s quantum momentum was already building before WYPulse arrived. In August 2022, Jifa Tian received a five-year, $5 million National Science Foundation grant to expand quantum information science and engineering research and education at UW with Purdue University, with work running through Aug. 31, 2027. With the new magnet in place, that network now has a rare instrument in Laramie that could help keep researchers, funding and commercial ideas in Albany County.