The KU Leuven pulsed-field facility solid-state physics in high magnetic fields

The pulsed-field facility has five parallel measuring stations. Most functi ons of each experiment, in particular, the control of the capacitor bank, d ata recording and cryogenics, are controlled by a central computer which is part of a network for data processing and is linked by fiber optics to the capacitor bank and the stations. User magnets are designed to work reliabl y up to 50-60 T with a pulse duration of the order of 20 ms. The pulse can be extended by a crowbar circuit. The available cryogenic equipment include s flow cryostats, He-4 bath cryostats, He-3 bath cryostat and a 50 mK dilut ion refrigerator. Physical properties such as magnetization, magneto-transp ort phenomena, far-infrared (FIR) optical absorption and photoluminescence (PL) in the visible and near infrared can be studied. The solid-state resea rch is focused on the following topics: the normal state transport properti es of high-temperature superconductors, the study of magnetic systems as sp in-Peierls compounds, Mn-Oxide GMR materials and Fe-Oxide garnet compounds, and low-dimensional semiconductors such as self-assembled quantum dots and quantum wells. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.