<p>Where the world's most powerful magnets are made looks like a sophisticated machine shop, a handyman's special where car-radiator clamps get used alongside superconducting wire and something concocted by Dr. Seuss.</p>
<p>About 40 people, ranging from cryogenics and material engineers to physicists with Ph.D's and welders with high-school diplomas, work here at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory based at Florida State University.</p>
<p>They design the tools and methods to manufacture one-of-a-kind superconducting magnets, and their jobs are expanding as demand grows for them to design and build bigger and better magnets for the world.</p>
<p>An $8.7 million hybrid magnet, similar to one at the mag lab but with a different cone-shaped horizontal superconducting coil, is being designed at FSU's mag lab and will be erected at the Hahn-Meitner Instiut in Berlin. The mag lab basically is the general contractor for the deal. It may take until 2012 before the magnet is up and running.</p>
<p>"There's very few people in the world who know how to build high-field resistive magnets. We've set 15 world records," said Mark Bird, interim director for magnet science and technology, and the man in charge of getting the magnets built. "We're one of the few places."</p>
<p>A new team leader, Olessandro Bonito Oliva, has been hired, and others also are being added to the team, as the mag lab pumps up its high-tech, high-wage workforce to fill this order.</p>
<p>More orders may be coming from places like the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Spallation Neutron Source, the Advanced Photon Source X-ray research facility outside Chicago and laboratories in France.</p>
<p>Recently, a new nonprofit organization, Florida State University Magnet Research and Development, Inc., was approved by the FSU board of trustees. The fledgling magnet R&D entity is likely to operate similar to FSU's Research Foundation, handling the big business of contracting to build super magnets and adding flexibility to the process. In the past, the mag lab built a few magnets for overseas cutomers, but they were smaller in price and scale.</p>
<p>Overhead charges for building the magnets, and the royalties and patents paid for using magnet designs developed at FSU's mag lab, probably will flow into the magnet R&D organization. But the details of the fledgling entity, which will be run by a board, aren't worked out yet.</p>
<p>Labs use superconducting magnets to do things like firing a beam of neutrons or X-rays into the magnet, hitting a material like a protein and observing the results in order to better understand the protein. That process can lead to new drugs treating diseases like AIDS, influenza or tuberculosis.</p>
<p>"What we're trying to do is raise the manufacturing base for very high-tech equipment," FSU Vice President for Research Kirby Kemper told trustees.</p>
<p>The R&D operation "will allow us to get in the business of building magnets," Kemper said. "It increases jobs here."</p>
<p>From the Tallahassee Democrat; for the rest of the article see: <a href="http://www.tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070206/FSU01/702060336/1008/FSU%5B/url%5D">http://www.tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070206/FSU01/702060336/1008/FSU</a></p>