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Physicists Develop Faster Method to Create Bose-Einstein Condensates

MIT physicists have improved the cooling techniques used to cool atoms into Bose-Einstein condensates. The new method is faster than the conventional one and conserves a large fraction of the original atoms.

A New, Cold Window into Electron Behavior

Physicists at MIT and Princeton University have developed a technique that can peer deep beneath the surface of a material to identify the energies and momenta of electrons there.

Linde Lifts Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloons High

The iconic Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons once again soared above the streets of New York City thanks to helium supplied by Linde North America, Inc. Linde supplied some 300,000 cubic feet of helium to the parade this year, the 23rd consecutive year of its partnership with Macy’s.

Physicists Propose Superfluid Helium Dark Matter Detector

Physicists from Brown University have devised a new strategy for directly detecting dark matter with a tub of superfluid helium. The idea is that dark matter particles passing through the tub should, on very rare occasions, smack into the nucleus of a helium atom.

NMR Imaging Reveals How Flu Virus Spreads from Cell to Cell

After a flu virus infects a host cell and hijacks its inner workings to create copies of itself, these copies gather into viral buds that break free from the host cell to infect again. A new study from MIT now provides the clearest picture yet of how the buds are...

JWST Completes Final Cryogenic Testing

NASA engineers unsealed the vault-like, 40-foot diameter, 40-ton door of Chamber A at Johnson Space Center in Houston on November 18, signaling the end of nearly 100 days of cryogenic testing for the agency's James Webb Space Telescope.

Latest in Defining Cryogenics

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...

Latest in Cryo Central

Magnets

From “Superconductivity: Present and Future Applications” by the Coalition for the Commercial Application of Superconductors. Particle physics uses accelerators to recreate the conditions of the early universe in an attempt to piece together the complex puzzle of how we got to where we are today. These huge machines are used...

Energy Storage

From “Superconductivity: Present and Future Applications” by the Coalition for the Commercial Application of Superconductors. With power lines increasingly congested and prone to instability, strategic injection of brief bursts of real power can play a crucial role in maintaining grid reliability. Small-scale Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) systems, based on...

Astronomy

ASTRONOMY IN SPACE by Peter V. Mason, retired, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Visiting Associate, California Institute of Technology. Pmason@alumni.caltech.edu In thinking about the reasons to perform astronomy in space, we first consider the effect of the earth’s atmosphere. On a scale of decreasing energy, gamma rays, cosmic rays, X-rays and...

Cryocoolers

What is a Cryocooler? A mechanism that can extract heat from an object (cooler) and by doing so draw its temperature down below approximately 150 Kelvin (cryo). — (Courtesy Dr. Willy Gully) What is the difference between a Cryocooler and a Cryostat? A cryostat is any device designed to maintain...

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