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Fermilab Awarded More than $10 million for Quantum Science

The US Department of Energy has awarded scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (CSA CSM) more than $10 million to spur research that could revolutionize scientific understanding of nature and the very way it's investigated.

Cryogenic Cooling of Sensing Devices Conference

Cryogenic Cooling of Sensing Devices, a conference sponsored by SPIE, the international professional society for optics and photonics technology, will be held April 14-18, 2019, at the Baltimore Convention Center, Maryland. Conference chairs are Tonny Benschop, Thales Cryogenics B.V. (Netherlands); Sergey V. Riabzev, RICOR Cryogenic & Vacuum Systems (Israel); and...

Staying Chill, Even When Disaster Strikes

When most people prepare for a hurricane, they buy food and water. But when scientist Amanda Moors sees one of those big, red, pinwheel-shaped storms appear on the weather map, she buys liquid nitrogen. Moors spends a lot of time thinking about failure. Not career failure or experiment failure, but...

The ‘Gloo’ Behind James Webb Space Telescope’s Spider Technology

It takes a team of talented individuals working in unison to brainstorm, build and deliver what will become the world’s most powerful space telescope. Marcelino Sansebastian is a Senior Instrument Technician at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who has been deeply involved with NASA’s James Webb Space...

A Superconductor Story with a Twist

There’s a literal disturbance in the force that alters what physicists have long thought of as a characteristic of superconductivity, according to Rice University scientists. Rice physicists Pengcheng Dai and Andriy Nevidomskyy and their colleagues used simulations and neutron scattering experiments that show the atomic structure of materials to reveal...

Uganda’s First Cryopreservation Unit is Conserving Banana Diversity

Christopher Bendana of Cornell University’s Alliance for Science reports that Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) is using liquid nitrogen to conserve banana cell lines in a pioneering effort that could help researchers striving to combat disease and climate threats. The science of storing tissues in liquid nitrogen, also commonly...

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Dewar

A dewar is a type of cryostat named after Sir James Dewar, the researcher who first developed the concept of a vacuum insulated container with silvered walls to reflect thermal radiation. Dewar was the first to liquefy hydrogen, and he created the device to store his discovery. The thermos bottle...

Stirling and Gifford-McMahon Cryocoolers

Stirling and Gifford-McMahon (GM) cryocoolers are two of the most commonly used cryocoolers in cryogenics. Both devices have a significant industrial base and operate at a wide range of temperatures and capacities. The thermodynamic cycles for both of these cryocoolers are quite similar. The Stirling cycle consists of a compressor,...

Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)

A significant commercial application of cryogenics is the liquefaction, transport and storage of natural gas. Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is generally 95 percent methane with a few percent ethane and much lower concentrations of propane and butane. LNG liquefies at 111.6 K. Unlike many applications of cryogenics, the motivation for...

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....