The upgrade of the Oxford High Magnetic Field Laboratory

There has been a high field magnet facility in Oxford since shortly after WW II. The heart of this installation used to be a 2 MW rotary converter that powered water-cooled copper solenoids. The generator was retired some two years ago and the emphasis was switched to superconducting magnets and pulsed magnets. Recent success in attracting funding has enabled us to undertake several programmes of upgrading and re-equipping, which are described in this paper. They are: Converting the space occupied by the old generator, which will give us three pulsed magnet stations. The magnets will be in pits below floor level for safety. The maximum fields that we generate at present are over 60 T using magnets and high strength conductors developed in house. We have acquired a new superconducting magnet that gives, 20T in a 40 mm bore at 4.2K (we believe that this is a first world-wide) and 21.5T in 40 mm at 2.2K. The magnet can also be configured to give up to 18T in a 110 mm bore by the removal of the innermost section. Using the new superconducting magnet we can advance our programme of research and development of high T/sub c/ insert coils for very high fields and we hope to have static fields of 25T before long. Development of "miniature" bore pulsed magnets and the associated cryogenics for fields >70T.