A Simultaneous High Temperature and High Magnetic Field Furnace for Advanced Materials Synthesis and Processing

Recent work applying magnetic fields to materials synthesis and processing has demonstrated promising effects on the properties of the products. Enhanced kinetics, improved mechanical properties, shifting phase equilibria, or even highly altered quantum states have been observed following heat treatments in high magnetic fields. The underlying physical processes responsible for these effects, as well as the opportunities for materials design and discovery they offer, remain largely underexplored. A critical obstacle to developing this understanding is the lack of instrumentation which can perform a controlled experiment over a wide range of both field and temperature. Here we describe our development of a maximum 1200 °C furnace insert for a 400 MHz NMR (9.4 T), 89 mm bore magnet. Preliminary examples of field-assisted synthesis and processing experiments are also reported.