This was the second time that the User Meeting took place outside one of the EMFL high-field facilities. With over 50 participants, it was very well attended. Warsaw was chosen as venue to particularly promote the exchange of ideas and wishes with our (future) Polish users. Since this year, Poland is the newest member of the EMFL. This was possible through a grant from the Polish ministry of Education to a consortium of Polish high-magnetic-field users, that is being coordinated by Prof. Adam Babinski (University of Warsaw), who also hosted the meeting. The User Meeting included two scientific and one technical session, to showcase some of the most recent scientific highlights as well as new technical and instrumentational developments at the high-field facilities.
The technical session focused on recent progress and developments in magnet technology particularly on the superconducting technology for which Xavier Chaud showed outstanding new results using high-Tc coils in Grenoble. Jerome Beard presented the planned upgrade of the Toulouse capacitor bank, allowing to store more energy and an even more reliable use of the installation. Jake Ayres’ work focused on high-pressure experimental results that were obtained in Nijmegen and, finally, Toni Helm showed the possibilities of focused ion beams to microstructure samples for experimental investigations under extreme conditions. The scientific highlights were of a very high quality and covered many areas of topical interest including 2D materials, transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), perovskites, strange metals, correlated systems, and superconductors. The talks illustrated the wide variety of research topics that can be investigated using intense magnetic fields.
The User Committee meeting was chaired by Raivo Stern (NICPB, Tallinn, Estonia) who reported the outcome of the meeting and the suggestions of the Committee back to the Board of Directors at the end of the meeting.
We would like to thank all the staff at the University of Warsaw, and especially Prof. Adam Babinski, for their excellent organization and for the diverse and inspiring meeting. The next EMFL meeting will be held at the HLD in Dresden, Germany, in June 2020.