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Dr. Barbara Frei-Spreiter Appointed New CEO of RUAG International Holding AG and Beyond Gravity

By Phillipp Bircher With the appointment of Dr. Barbara Frei-Spreiter, RUAG International concludes the multi-stage search process to succeed André Wall as CEO of RUAG International and its space business, Beyond Gravity. Dr. Barbara Frei-Spreiter is a proven Swiss executive with over 25 years of international leadership experience in global...

Solving a Mystery in Dark Matter Detectors Could Improve Quantum Computers

By Lauren Biron Although dark matter makes up most of the mass in our universe, it has never been directly observed. To hunt for lighter dark matter and other rare phenomena, researchers must solve a puzzle in their supersensitive detectors: an unexpected number of low-energy events, called the “low-energy excess”...

How Argonne’s Aurora Supercomputer Is Opening up New Horizons for Fusion Energy Research

By Christina Nunez If you could build a star on Earth and harness its abundant energy, you’d need to know exactly how to store the star and keep it stable. Fusion energy scientists have been working for decades to make the idea a reality. They now have a potent new tool at...

Hydrogen Aviation Advances With Airbus and RWTH Aachen’s GENtwoPRO Fuel Cell Project

By Erin Kilgore If you’ve been tracking the future of hydrogen aviation, you know it’s a path packed with big ideas and tricky engineering puzzles. Now, Airbus and RWTH Aachen University have kicked off an Airbus RWTH Aachen partnership laser-focused on a near-term, high-impact goal: using scalable fuel cell technology to power regional aircraft. Early in Airbus’s hydrogen journey,...

World’s Most Powerful Particle Collider Upgrade Enters Next Phase with Giant Cold Boxes

By Georgina Jedikovska CERN engineers have transported two gleaming cryogenic “cold boxes” deep into the tunnels of the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HiLumi LHC), as part of the ambitious upgrade to the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Lowered close to the ATLAS and CMS experiment detectors, the two giant pieces...

Dutch Project Quper Results in New Leiden Cryogenics Mini-fridge, Controlled by OrangeQS Juice Operating System

An inverted tabletop dilution refrigerator that can achieve millikelvin temperatures has long been the holy grail for fast-turnaround quantum technology development. It is especially useful for fast and affordable quantum chip testing. In 2023, Quantum Delta NL awarded funding to companies Leiden Cryogenics and Orange Quantum Systems for the Quper...

Latest in Defining Cryogenics

Helium-3

Helium-3 (3He) is one of the two stable isotopes of helium. The other is the much more common Helium-4 (4He). Neither of these isotopes should be confused with He II, which is the second liquid phase of 4He. He II was discussed in this column in the Spring 2010 edition...

Cryopumping

Cryopumping refers to the use of cryogenic temperatures to produce vacuum in enclosed spaces. More broadly, it can also refer to the removal of gases via cryogenic temperatures from a flow stream or enclosure without necessarily resulting in vacuum pressures. This is an important application of cryogenics and is used...

Thermal Acoustic Oscillations

Thermal Acoustic Oscillations (TAO) are a common event in cryogenic systems that can have significant adverse effects on the performance of the system. TAOs are sustained pressure oscillations that can occur in tubes containing gas, closed at one end (the warm end) that have a very large temperature gradient along...

Latest in Cryo Central

Primary Standards

Elie K. Track Hypres, Inc. elie@hypres.com http://www.hypres.com/ Primary standards involve the exact definition and realization of units of measurement for various quantities, time, length, mass, voltage, resistance, current, etc. International agreements based on the latest scientific knowledge define those units, and their realizations vary depending on the unit itself. For...

Shrink Fitting

Robin A. Rhodes Cryogenic Institute of New England, Inc. rrhodes@nitrofreeze.com Shrink fitting, (or “compression fitting” as it is sometimes called), is a method used to insert a pin or bushing into a housing or other assembly requiring an extremely tight tolerance fit. It can be used as an alternative to...

Telecommunications

From the Winter 2004 issue of Cold Facts magazine The recent M-Calc IV — 4th Industry Assessment workshop discussing military and commercial applications for low-cost cryocoolers, held in November in San Diego, highlighted progress being made in cryogenics as applied in telecommunications. The reliability and long lifetime of projects now...

Wind Tunnels

Dr. Robert Kilgore The development of the cryogenic wind tunnel is one of many significant breakthroughs in both cryogenics and wind-tunnel technology made during the past millennium. Interest in the development of high-speed commercial and military aircraft resulted in a review of problems of flow simulation in transonic wind tunnels...

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