National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, or MagLab, is a user facility in Tallahassee's Innovation Park that builds the world's strongest research magnets and lends time on them to visiting scientists.

The lab's own description calls the Tallahassee-headquartered lab the largest and highest-powered magnet laboratory in the world and the only facility of its kind in the United States. More than a thousand scientists from dozens of countries come each year and, thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation and the State of Florida, use the facilities for free; their findings produce more than 400 publications a year in journals such as Nature, Science and Physical Review Letters. The lab's own pages give different visitor counts: the history page says more than 1500 a year, and the By the Numbers page counts 1,958 scientists in 2022.

Florida State University runs the headquarters at 1800 E. Paul Dirac Drive, Tallahassee, the address in the MagLab's page footer, with partner sites at the University of Florida and Los Alamos National Laboratory. FSU News said in March 2024 that the lab comprises more than 500,000 square feet at its FSU headquarters and has been headquartered at FSU since 1994; the lab's By the Numbers page, last modified in August 2025, gives 440,000 square feet for all three branches. The two figures come from the lab and its host university and are reported here as published.

The setting matters to the lab's neighbors. Innovation Park, governed by the Leon County Research and Development Authority, says the MagLab was dedicated at the park in 1994 and that since its arrival the park has grown into an innovation hub for magnetics, aero-propulsion, materials, energy, health and life sciences. The City of Tallahassee airport says Tallahassee International Airport is only three miles from Innovation Park and that Tallahassee is considered the Magnetic Capital of the World.

The MagLab holds the world record for a continuous user magnet, 45 tesla, set by a Tallahassee hybrid that pairs a superconducting magnet with a resistive one.

The 45 tesla hybrid page describes an 11.5 tesla superconducting magnet combined with a 33.5 tesla resistive magnet, online since December 1999 at a cost of $14.4 million. It weighs 35 tons, stands 22 feet tall and needs about 4,000 gallons of chilled water every minute to keep the resistive part from overheating. The page gives its power as 33 megawatts in the text and 30 MW in its statistics table, and By the Numbers also says 33. If warmed to room temperature, it takes at least six weeks to cool back down. For scale, the lab notes that the Earth's magnetic field is one twenty-thousandth of a tesla.

Why a hybrid? Associate Lab Director Scott Hannahs explains in the MagLab Dictionary that superconducting wire uses very little power but stops superconducting above a certain field, while resistive magnets go higher but use a large amount of electric power. Putting the superconducting magnet outside and a resistive magnet inside reaches the highest fields with a minimum of power. His figures differ slightly from the magnet page: he describes a 34 tesla inner magnet and an outer coil kept at about 1.5 kelvin, where the magnet page gives 33.5 tesla and 1.8 kelvin.

The newer frontier in Tallahassee is superconductors alone. The 32 tesla all-superconducting magnet, online since December 2017, pairs niobium-tin and niobium-titanium coils with two YBCO coils, a ceramic of yttrium, barium, copper and oxygen, using 6 miles of superconductor formed into 112 disc-shaped pancakes. The lab says the jump to 32 tesla was bigger than all the improvements of the past 40 years combined, and its builders won a 2022 R&D 100 Award.

Florida State University won the lab in a national competition, and the National Science Foundation awarded it to FSU in August 1990.

The MagLab history credits Jack Crow of FSU in Tallahassee, Don Parkin of Los Alamos and Neil Sullivan of the University of Florida with the proposal, backed by key Florida officials and submitted to the National Science Foundation in 1989, for a lab headquartered near FSU. It challenged the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, home of the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory.

The first building was a large, never-occupied office complex 2 miles south of FSU's main campus, with two new wings added at either end for the magnets. Pouring the meter-thick concrete floor of the Continuous (DC) Field Facility went on for several days and nights, and construction finished on time and under budget. In June 1994 the lab ran a 27 tesla magnet, a new world record, and the following October, Vice President Al Gore dedicated the Tallahassee facility before a crowd of more than 1,000 people. Crow was named the first director. The timeline adds that the lab held its first Open House at the dedication.

Leadership has changed twice. Greg Boebinger took the helm in 2004, and FSU News reported in March 2024 that FSU had named Kathleen Amm, director of the Magnet Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory and a 1998 FSU doctoral graduate advised by Crow, to begin as director on May 6, succeeding Boebinger after his 20-year tenure. The lab leadership page, read October 18, 2026, lists Amm as MagLab director, Eric Palm and Tim Murphy as deputy lab directors, and Laura Greene as chief scientist.

The MagLab timeline lists discoveries by its scientists and users, from a long-predicted energy pattern in graphene to zero-resistance current near room temperature.

In May 2013, according to the MagLab timeline, two teams working with graphene observed a never-before-seen energy pattern first theorized in 1976, known as Hofstadter's butterfly. In October 2017 physicists proved the 30-year-old theory of the even-denominator fractional quantum Hall state and established bilayer graphene as a promising platform for quantum computation. In May 2019 scientists observed electrical current with zero resistance in a hydrogen-packed compound squeezed to ultra-high pressure, close to room temperature.

The research also reaches outside physics. In November 2023 the timeline records that MagLab scientists would analyze soil and water samples from the wildfires that devastated parts of Maui that August. Over the years, the history page says, the lab has set records for resistive magnets (27, 30, 33, 35 and 36.2 tesla), hybrid magnets (45 tesla) and pulsed magnets, and its faculty has included Nobel Prize laureates and National Academy of Sciences members.

In 2017 the MagLab consumed 8 percent of the electricity provided to all Tallahassee residences and businesses, according to the lab's own figures.

The By the Numbers page says the annual electric bill at the Tallahassee headquarters was $4 million in 2017, 67 percent of it for magnet use, and that the helium and nitrogen bill there was $1,064,102. The FSU facility has a 56 megawatt power supply, and the DC Field Facility in Tallahassee averaged 6,572,000 kilowatt hours a month in 2017, against 920 for an average U.S. home.

Money comes mainly from the National Science Foundation, with Florida as partner. The timeline records that in December 2022 the NSF announced a $195.5 million cooperative agreement over five years, keeping the lab headquartered at FSU, with partner sites at the University of Florida and Los Alamos, through 2027. The lab projects a $6.44 return to the state of Florida for each dollar invested.

Staffing reflects the university setting in Tallahassee. The lab counted 759 employees in 2022, 39 percent of them postdocs, graduate students or undergraduates, with staff from 50 countries.

Yes, at the annual Open House, the one day a year visitors can go behind the scenes to parts of the Tallahassee lab not normally open to the public.

FSU News reported that the 2026 Open House, with a books and literature theme, was set for Saturday, February 21, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Innovation Park headquarters, with the Junkyard Magnet, Potato Launcher, Quarter Shrinker, Rocket Cars and ice cream made with liquid nitrogen, and said the event regularly draws crowds of up to 10,000 people. The lab counted more than 10,000 Open House visitors in 2025, and its timeline says the 2022 Open House hosted more than 11,700.

Schools get more regular access. About 1,500 K-12 students took part in a tour or classroom outreach in 2024, according to the lab, and in May 2025, the timeline notes, Sesame Workshop and Discovery Education produced a virtual field trip about the Tallahassee lab to celebrate the National Science Foundation's 75th anniversary.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the MagLab's About, By the Numbers, World Records, history, timeline, leadership and magnet pages, two FSU News releases, the Innovation Park About page and the City of Tallahassee airport cargo page.