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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

Joule-Thomson Effect

The Joule-Thomson (JT) effect is a thermodynamic process that occurs when a fluid expands from high pressure to low pressure at constant enthalpy (an isenthalpic process). Such a process can be approximated in the real world by expanding a fluid from high pressure to low pressure across a valve. Under...

Current Leads

One of the challenges of using superconducting magnets is the connection of the magnet to a room temperature power supply. This is accomplished via current leads. The trick is that current leads should ideally have a low heat leak, since they connect room temperature to cryogenic temperature, while at the...

Multilayer Insulation

Multilayer insulation (also referred to as superinsulation) is a key component in the reduction of heat leak to cryogenic systems due to thermal radiation. MLI consists of a series of uncooled reflective surfaces placed in the vacuum space between two surfaces, one warmer than the other. Generally speaking, for ideal...

Latest in Cryo Central

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...

History of Cryogenics

From the Fall 1999 issue of Cold Facts magazine Millennium Breakthroughs A variety of CSA members give different perspectives on the past millennium: What were the most significant breakthroughs in cryogenics during the past millennium? Prof. R.G. Scurlock, Kryos Technology, scurlock@soton.ac.uk (“Breakthrough” = way through obstacles — Oxford English Dictionary)...

Cryobiology

Andreas Sputtek Past President Society for Cryobiology sputtek@uke.uni-hamburg.de or http://www.sputtek.de/. The word cryobiology (from the Greek words “cryo” = cold, “bios” = life, and “logos” = science) literally signifies the science of life at low temperatures. In practice, this field comprises the study of any biological material or system (e.g.,...

Cryogenic Insulation

James E. Fesmire Cryogenics Test Laboratory NASA Kennedy Space Center james.e.fesmire@nasa.gov Introduction In today’s world, the use of cryogenics and low-temperature refrigeration is taking a more and more significant role. From the food industry, transportation, energy, and medical applications to the Space Shuttle, cryogenic liquids must be stored, handled, and...

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