One of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's international partners, Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute, is delivering a massive 16-Tesla magnet at the Department of Energy's Spallation Neutron Source to provide unique environmental conditions for sample analysis. Several of the SNS instruments were designed from the outset to produce and use beams of polarized ? or magnetically identical ? neutrons and all of them can add devices to produce polarized neutron beams. Using polarized neutrons to probe materials provides more information about magnetic structure and fluctuations in materials than using an unpolarized neutron beam. The new magnet is expected to be particularly useful in the study of superconductors and nanomaterials. To ensure that the field produced by the giant magnet doesn't interfere with nearby instruments, it is enclosed in a second set of magnetic coils that compensate, or "jam," the magnetic field produced by the primary coils. The magnet is the first compensated magnet of this strength to be built for a neutron beam line.
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