Well, mirabile dictu: we will neither quench nor move our magnet.
First, many thousand thanks to the dozens of folks who responded on this puzzle.
The matter was escalated to Dean's office, where calmer heads prevailed.
The Dean requested more field data - including outside the physics lab where
the values had been reported to be concerningly high.
The most recent development is that some of us have downloaded apps that turn
a smart phone into a basic magnetometer, and we've started walking around the
lab building waving our phones, looking like tourists.
It seems that our building pillars contain conduits/grounding circuits/something
that generates stray field, because field increases dramatically when one approaches
a support pillar. This morning someone just showed me a reading they took next
to a first floor pillar: 2.74 G!
So there you go. We're not shutting down our magnet, and I LOVE doing another
department's work for them. Thank you all for the support and commiseration as
we parried back at this request yet again (we've been hearing about it since
2017, before the lab building was even built). Now we have DATA that should
put the complaint to bed forever!
Heather Schenck
Received on Tue Apr 04 2023 - 04:36:40 MST