TOWARDS ABSOLUTE ZERO

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18193, 14 September 1933, Page 9

TOWARDS ABSOLUTE ZERO

ANOTHER STEP FORWARD DUTCH EXPERIMENTS ROTTERDAM, July 14. Professor W. J. do Haas, of Loiden University, and Professor H. A. Kramers announce that in the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory they have obtained a temperature only eight-hundredths of a degree above absolute zero, which corresponds to about 491 deg. of frost in the Fahrenheit scale. This temperature is the lowest ever reached by man, and marks another step forward in a field where Dutch physicists have for years led the world. Kamerlingh Onnes was himself the first to liquefy helium (1908), and reached a temperature of o.B2dcg. K. by reducing the vapor pressure of liquid holium Using the same method bis colleague, Professor Keesom, who was the first to solidify helium (1926), reached o.7ldeg. K. By another method, described as the adiabatic demagnetisation of paramagnetic salts, Professor Haas and Professor Kramers recently got down to a temperature certainly below o.27dcg. K. The same experimenters are now only 0.08 tlcg. above the absolute zero, where a body would have no heat at all and where all atomic motion would ceaso. Tho attainment of low temperaturo is of particular importance for electrical research. At very low temperatures metals appear to lose their specific heat and their electrical resistance, and a current can go round and' round a circuit for days with no apparent diminution of energy.