cryogenics

A massive 95-metric ton coldbox that completed a cross-ocean journey from France to Batavia, Illinois was moved across the Fermilab campus this week.

The coldbox, a vital piece of Fermilab’s new linear accelerator, is on a two-month voyage from France to its new home in Batavia, Illinois. It will be at the heart of the cryogenic system for the lab’s upgraded accelerator complex.

Plans are moving ahead for the liquid nitrogen refrigeration system which will use liquid nitrogen to cool the 17,500 tons of liquid argon that will fill the neutrino detectors at the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility in the Sanford Lab. The system is expected to be built by 2026, and operational underground by the end of 2026 to support the installation of some detector elements, and the operations of the full facility starting in early 2028.

The cryogenic plant, to be installed a mile underground, will provide the cooling for two large liquid-argon neutrino detectors for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

Scientists working on the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment are developing a vertical drift detector. The new technology may open doors to building large neutrino detectors at a lower cost and in a simpler manner.

To cool quantum computing components, researchers use machines called dilution refrigerators. Researchers and engineers from the SQMS Center are building Colossus, the largest, most powerful refrigerator at millikelvin temperatures ever made. The new machine will enable new physics and quantum computing experiments.

From SLAC, August 31, 2022: Fermilab researchers worked with a team of 20 operators and engineers at SLAC on cryogenics to build a helium-refrigeration plant to lower the LCLS-II accelerator to superconducting temperatures. Now, it only takes one and a half hours to make a superconducting particle accelerator at SLAC colder than outer space.

A little over a year into construction, the structure of the building that will house the cryogenic equipment for the PIP-II particle accelerator is largely complete.

From the DOE Office of Science, Aug. 25: The DOE Office of Science announced 10 DOE national laboratory projects, including one led by Fermilab, have been selected to receive funding as part of research related to microelectronics co-design. Senior engineer Davide Braga’s work on hybrid cryogenic detector architectures for sensing and edge computing enabled by new fabrication processes was chosen as one of the 10 awards.

The Cryogenic Society of America has awarded Benjamin Hansen its Award for Excellence in Cryogenic Operations and Support. Head of Fermilab’s Cryogenics Operations Department, he received the award for his leadership maintaining and operating six helium cryogenic test facilities.