UK team goes micro-Kelvin

UK: A UK team has developed what is said to to be the first refrigerator capable of achieving micro-Kelvin temperatures without the use of liquid cryogens.

A joint development by engineers and scientists at Oxford Instruments and Royal Holloway University of London, this unique system breaks all previous cryogen-free temperature records and opens up a new market for research applications in quantum computing and condensed matter physics.

Engineers and scientists are said to have combined Oxford Instruments’ Triton dilution refrigerator integrated with a superconducting magnet and a nuclear demagnetization stage developed by RHUL. They successfully maintained temperatures below 1 milli-Kelvin for more than 24 hours with a lowest temperature of 600 micro-Kelvin.

Dr Michael Cuthbert, technical director at Oxford Instruments said: “Developing cryogen-free technology for ultra low temperatures has opened up new markets and new applications. Extending this temperature range down below 1mK provides new cooling platforms to the research community to further investigate quantum mechanical regimes in extreme environments.”

Read more about the system at http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.7049.