Tag archives: low-temperature physics

The Large Hadron Collider’s superconducting magnets are just one of the many spin-offs from the race to absolute zero. (Courtesy: CERN)

By Hamish Johnston

Physicists have long been interested in how nature behaves under very cold conditions, and about 200 years ago the race began to realize the lowest temperature ever. Along the way, many new and amazing states of matter have been discovered, including superconductors, superfluids and Bose–Einstein condensates. More recently, access to extremely low temperatures has contributed to the current renaissance in the study of fundamental quantum mechanics and the development of quantum computers.

In his latest radio programme, the BBC’s resident polymath Melvyn Bragg looks at this race to the bottom, which really heated up in the late 19th century when physicists and chemists were feverishly liquidizing a wide range of gases include those cryogenic favourites nitrogen – and a little later in 1908 – helium.

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