cryogenics

The labs are developing a practical approach to reduce the size and cost of superconducting linear accelerators, which offer great potential for addressing used nuclear fuel, while also improving their reliability.

The former U.S. Steel plant is planned to be developed into a quantum research park named South Works. Fermilab’s Ben Hansen, director of the cryogenic technology division, talks about developing the cryogenic resources.

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.