Bell Labs: World-Record Magnets
Airship Italia takes off from King’s Bay on May 23 for its third—fatal—flight toward the North Pole.
Museo Storico A.M.—Centro documentazione “Umberto Nobile,” loc. Vigna di Valle, Bracciano, as reproduced in Matteo Leone and Nadia Robotti, “The polar expedition of the airship “Italia” (1928): A chapter in the history of physics.”
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Greg Boebinger, “World Record Magnets” (.pdf, 1 mb)This essay by Greg Boebinger describes the process by which he and his technician Al Passner developed a record-setting pulsed-field magnet at Bell Lab in the mid-1990s. Greg came to Bell in the late 1980s from MIT, where he obtained his PhD. Greg was one of the few scientists at Bell who were offered a permanent position as member of technical staff right out of their PhD work.
Prior to the time period of Boebinger’s work, two important areas of study required large magnetic fields, the fractional quantum Hall effect and high-Tc superconductivity, so the impetus to push the boundaries was strong, and Greg describes the discovery process in good detail here.
Boebinger left Bell in 1999 to head up the Los Alamos site of the National High Magnetic Field Lab. There, he worked with a large team to create the 100-Tesla pulsed magnetic field user facility. In 2005 he ascended to the directorship of the National High Magnetic Field Lab, located in Tallahassee, Florida. In 2024, he stepped down from this position to assume a professorship role at Florida State University, leaving a legacy of extraordinary accomplishments in the development of high magnetic fields and in supporting the related science and technologies.
—Arthur Ramirez
Cite this resource
Greg Boebinger, “Bell Labs: World Record Magnets,” with introduction by Arthur Ramirez, American Institute of Physics, 2026.
This essay is part of the Bell Labs, 1980–2000 collection.