A new facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory is allowing researchers to study materials in controlled extreme environments.

The new lab, in which researchers can create extremes in temperature, pressure and magnetic field, helps scientists examine the behavior of new materials, said Robert Modler, Ames Lab associate scientist and assistant professor of physics and astronomy.

“At Ames Lab, we study new materials, especially new metals,” he said. “We want to see how they behave in three-dimensional parameter space. This facility will help us do that.”

Using a special helium refrigerator, a high-pressure cell and a superconducting magnet, Ames Lab researchers can drastically change the environment around a material while it is being studied.

“There are not many facilities that can do this type of research,” Modler said. “I would guess there are probably only five comparable facilities in the world.”

The three-parameter environment allows Modler and other researchers to study a material in its “ground state,” which means the material is subjected to low temperatures and is in a low-energy state.

When a material is in its ground state, its atoms vibrate much more slowly than normal, making it easier for scientists to study the material, Modler said.

He noted the refrigerator can cool materials to temperatures as low as 0.05 Kelvin, lower than any temperature found existing naturally in the universe. Room temperature is 300 K.

Modler can also alter the environment around the material by raising the pressure as high as 20,000 atmospheres.

“One atmosphere is equivalent to the pressure on the surface of the earth,” he explained. “Twenty-thousand atmospheres would be like the weight of a Toyota Camry on the tip of a medium-sized Phillips-head screwdriver.”

The superconducting magnet Modler uses can create magnetic fields up to 100,000 times that of the Earth, he said. Together with low temperatures and high pressure, the magnetic field can cause abrupt changes in materials.

“By creating the right conditions, you can get a magnetic material to become superconducting or an insulated material to become metal,” he said. “We are looking for adaptive materials.”

Modler said he and a group of graduate students worked for a year and a half to create the facility, which has been in use since January.

Andrew Thomas, graduate student in physics and astronomy and one of the students working with Modler, said the facility allows Ames Lab researchers to produce lower temperatures than they could before.

“The big step up is we can now reach much lower temperatures — about one-tenth the temperature of what we could previously do at the Ames Lab,” he said. “We can put samples in a much more extreme environment than we could before.”

Thomas said another benefit is that three environmental properties can all be altered at once with the new lab.

“The main thing I like about it is that you’re able to take a look at a lot of different properties of the materials,” he said. “You can look at a lot of different things with just one setup.”