"The Coldest Spot on Earth": Low Temperature Physics, Superfluidity, and the Discovery of Superconductivity
Overview
The Dutch experimental physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926) worked for more than four decades in low temperature physics, a discipline he helped to establish over the years as a complete and independent field of study. When in 1908 Kamerlingh Onnes succeeded in liquefying helium, he became the very first experimentalist to reach a temperature as low as 4.2 Kelvin (or -451.84°F). His discovery of superconductivity three years later opened whole new vistas of theoretical and experimental researches that are still today of the utmost importance to the progress of science and technology.
Background
Low temperature physics really began in the second half of the nineteenth century with the discovery in 1852 of the Joule-Thomson effect, attributed to two British physicists, James Prescott Joule (1818-1889) and Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907). That year Thomson, based on his and Joule's thermodynamical studies, observed that when a gas expands in a vacuum its temperature decreases. Indeed if gases were allowed to expand, then compressed under conditions which did not allow them to regain the lost heat, and expanded once more, and so on over and over in cascade, then very low temperatures could be achieved.
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