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EASITrain to Hire, Fund PhD Candidates in Superconductivity and Related Fields

CERN has announced its European Advanced Superconductivity Innovation and Training project (EASITrain), a four-year initiative that brings together leading research institutes and industrial partners to train the next generation of researchers. It will cover the development of 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) on projects related to superconducting wires, superconducting thin...

Electronic Symmetry Breaking Common in Superconducting Materials in High Magnetic Fields

Researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory report that the phenomenon of electronic symmetry breaking is common in superconducting materials in high magnetic fields. Using transport measurements near the field-tuned quantum critical point of CeRhIn5 at 50 Tesla, the researchers observed a fluctuating nematic-like state in which the material’s electrons...

UA Researchers to Design New Cryogenic Focal Plane Arrays

The American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics (AIM Photonics), a public-private partnership advancing the nation’s photonics manufacturing capabilities, has chosen a University of Arizona research team to design, fabricate and test new PIC-based datalinks for cryogenic focal plane array (FPA) readout. The project, according to AIM Photonics, has the potential...

SQUID Detector Reaches New Sensitivity Levels

Investigators at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new sensor-array-based instrument that offers ultralow noise detection of small amounts of energy for a number of applications. The new device permits the collection of data from many more detectors than...

NASA Readies Multiple Balloon Program Experiments

NASA's balloon program is currently preparing new missions bearing sensitive instruments, including one designed to investigate the birth of our universe and another with ballooning origins that will fly on the International Space Station.

ICARUS Arrives at Fermilab, Greeted by Familiar Face

The ICARUS detector ended its journey across the Atlantic on July 26, arriving by semi-truck at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Waiting for it there was Angela Fava, an experimental physicist who first worked with the machine in 2006, tightening bolts and connecting cables while an undergrad in Italy. In...

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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....

Power usage: cryogenic systems vs. regular refrigerators

A recent project highlighted to me that closed cycle cryogenic cooling systems use far more electrical power to reduce temperatures by a few watts than regular refrigerators. I am sure it must be something to do with the extra difficulty of removing the heat from the liquid nitrogen or similar...

Redundancy strategies for mechanical -80C freezers

I was wondering what kind of redundancy strategies are people using for their mechanical -80C freezers? I am aware of the following. Please add if you are doing something different. 1) 1 Backup freezer for every 10 freezers – Empty and maintained at -80C at all times 2) Backup C02...

Method to move components in a cryogenic environment

Does anyone know of a method with which to reliably move components in a cryogenic environment? We are interested in moving detectors in a cryogenically cooled (2K) vacuum chamber, which is contained within a larger cryostat/isolation vacuum with thermal shields. As the desired horizontal or vertical displacement is between 10...