Engineering Researcher receives prestigious Young Researchers Award for developing new method for accelerator quench-spot detection in superfluid helium

Earlier this month, the International Institute of Refrigeration (IIR) announced the winners of the IIR scientific awards. Shiran Bao, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at the cryogenics lab at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, has been selected as the winner of the prestigious Peter Kapitza Award. The award will be conferred at the 25th IIR International Congress of Refrigeration (ICR) in Montreal, Canada, in August 2019.

Mechanical engineering grad student paper published as Editor's Suggestion in prestigious journal

Scientific experiments at the micro-level may always be a practice fraught with ambiguity, a challenge that has never stopped the most tenacious minds. Take researchers Brian Mastracci, Ph.D. and professor Wei Guo of the Cryogenics Lab at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. The pair recently developed a scheme that clarifies the process by which a cooling element for large-scale equipment (such as superconducting magnets) operates under turbulence.

FAMU-FSU cryogenic researchers use the science of “cool” to advance particle accelerator development

Engineering scientists develop new tools to make superconductor particle accelerators safer 

In 2008, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland exploded. This is one of the most powerful particle accelerators ever built. A faulty connection caused some magnets to overheat and melt, triggering an explosion of pressurized helium gas. Accidents like this are very dangerous and are very costly in terms of time, money and of course the possibility of human fatality. 

Being at the college is my testimony

Growing up, Jackson Dixon didn’t believe higher education would be his trajectory. As a kid, he was raised on farmland and assumed he’d tend the land like his father. However, Jackson had always taken a fascination to the mechanics of the farm tools he’d often use.

“I liked watching all the mechanical linkages working on the farm with the equipment and everything,” Dixon said. “It always seemed really cool to me. I’ve always wanted to be on the inside of creating that kind of stuff.”