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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

Cold Compressors

A common way to provide cooling below the normal boiling point of helium (4.2K) is to reduce the pressure above the bath of liquid helium, thus also reducing the bath’s equilibrium saturation temperature. For example, to produce a 1.8K bath of liquid helium, the saturation pressure has to be reduced...

Kapitza Conductance

Kapitza conductance refers to the heat transfer between a solid surface and a fluid that covers that surface. Fundamentally, it describes the inherent difficulty in transferring energy from a solid to the fluid covering the solid surface. This phenomenon was first observed by P. L. Kapitza in 1941 while studying...

Thermosyphons

A thermosyphon (or thermosiphon) is a device that transfers heat via natural convection in a fluid. The natural convection is driven by gravity with the colder, denser fluid flowing downhill and the warmer, less dense fluid flowing back up. Thus, thermosyphons connect an object to be cooled with a reservoir...

Latest in Cryo Central

Magnetic Levitation

From http://www.superconductors.org. Magnetic-levitation is an application where superconductors perform extremely well. Transport vehicles such as trains can be made to “float” on strong superconducting magnets, virtually eliminating friction between the train and its tracks. Not only would conventional electromagnets waste much of the electrical energy as heat, they would have...

Superconductivity

From Superpower website. History of Superconductivity Superconductivity was discovered in 1911 by the Dutch physicist, Heike Kammerlingh Onnes when he was able to liquefy helium by cooling it to 4 Kelvin, or -452°F. This enabled him to cool other materials close to absolute zero and investigate their electrical properties. He...

Medical Applications of Cryogenics

Neutron Therapy Cryogenics is at the heart of nuclear accelerators. Accelerators such as Fermilab’s Tevatron make neutron therapy for cancer possible. From Fermilab Today 4/20/09: Fermilab currently offers neutron therapy. But staff at Fermilab designed and built the proton accelerator used by the nation’s first hospital-based treatment center to use...

Nuclear Physics

Al Zeller National Superconducting Cyclotron Lab (NSCL) at Michigan State University zeller@nscl.msu.edu Cryogenics has a long history in nuclear physics. The technology has its origins in the use of cold traps for maintaining a vacuum, which is required to prevent beam loss and for generating high voltages used in acceleration....

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