The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is the home institution of the Pulsed Field Facility of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL). The NHMFL laboratories are the only facilities in the US (among a few world-wide) to host qualified users while running strong in-house science programs related to high magnetic field research. At Los Alamos, the NHMFL advances the frontiers of condensed matter physics at extreme conditions of high magnetic field, low temperature and pressure, utilizing start-of-the-art pulsed magnets and unique experimental capabilities. This paper will describe the current and future plans of pulsed magnet technology and science at the NHMFL Pulsed Field Facility at LANL.     

A study of early Los Alamos internal exposures to plutonium

Internal dose caused by exposure to (239)Pu/(240)Pu is calculated for a group of 210 former Los Alamos workers who participated in the urine bioassay programme during the years 1944-45. An iterative Bayesian procedure is employed, where the distribution of intake amounts resulting from an initial calculation is used to define a prior probability distribution of inhalation intakes for an iterated second calculation. The urine bioassay data from this time period were not of high quality, and the more accurate intake prior tempers the effect of spurious high samples, which were probably caused by sample contamination.     

Capabilities of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in nuclear target technology

Targets are made at Los Alamos for experiments at the Ion Beam Facility (Van de Graaff), the Medium Energy Physics Facility (LAMPF), and for experiments conducted at many other accelerators in the US and Europe. Thin, isotopic targets are made by sputtering and evaporation. Versatile, large-scale facilities exists for ceramics and plastics fabrication, electroplating, powder metallurgy, fabrication by pressing, casting and rolling, chemical and physical vapor deposition, and sputtering. Special developments include ultra-precision machining, cryogenic targets, and shaped-foil targets.     

Worldwide cryogenics - US Cryogenics at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory

Although applications to energy systems now provide the major motivation for research and development in low-temperature technology, the initial impetus for this work on a large scale at temperatures below 75 K arose from military and defence requirements. During and shortly after World War II, the evident need for cryogens in rocket and nuclear weapons research spawned, mainly in the US, several large cryogenic research organizations. Among the more prominent of these were, first, laboratories at the Ohio State University and at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) and, later, at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Boulder, Colorado. The resources of these three laboratories were allied to prepare and operate the cryogenic components for the ‘wet’ hydrogen bomb test in the South Pacific Islands in 1952 (the Boulder cryogenics laboratory was established primarily for this purpose). One result of this cooperation was the creation of a cryogenic industry that ultimately became capable of producing and handling the large amounds of liquid hydrogen, up to the order of 4 000 000 ? at a single location, required for the US space programme.From these beginnings as a weapons-related operation, the Cryogenics Laboratory at LASL has substantially changed its directions and expanded its scope.1 In this article we shall first provide a brief history of LASL's involvement in cryogenics since the weapons work and then outline the Laboratory's current activities in low-temperature physics and engineering.