Today it only takes one and a half hours to make a superconducting particle accelerator at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory colder than outer space.
“Now you click a button and the machine gets from 4.5 Kelvin down to 2 Kelvin,” said Eric Fauve, director of the Cryogenic team at SLAC.
While the process is fully automated now, getting this accelerator, called LCLS-II, to 2 Kelvin, or minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit, took six years of designing, building, installing, and starting up an intricate system.
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