Experimental Techniques: Cryostat Design, Material Properties and Superconductor Critical-Current Testing

I work in a lab that relies heavily on vacuum and cryogenics, and this book is invaluable. Descriptions of experimental techniques are accessible for a reasonably technical audience who themselves may not be experts in mechanical and cryogenic engineering. The appendices are indispensable and provide a quick volume of useful data when working out designs. Information is concentrated in one place, and otherwise would be spread out over dozens of papers and reference books. I keep this by my desk at all times.

Well written; appendices alone are very valuable.

Extremely useful book with lab techniques and details. It contains information valuable even for non-superconducting research. Books like this are real treasures.

Part I of this book is a broad-reaching and up-to-date (2006) introduction to experimental techniques for the graduate student who is about to get his hands wet with liquid helium (just kidding)for the first time. In fact, the temperature range addressed by the book is from pumped helium (~1.5 K) to helium's boiling point (4.2 K): there's nothing about He3 cryostats or dilution, adiabatic demagnetization, or Pomeranchuk refrigerators or about exotic thermometry in the mK range. It's also not a recipe book for how to build a cryostat...its figures are are too schematic for that...but it does give the reader an overview of almost everything that he or she will encounter when designing and/or using liquid helium cryostats, including the tricks to build the cryostat probe to which the experiment is to be attached.For the novice and cryogenic professional alike, the book includes numerous graphs of material properties covering the temperature range 4-300 K. However, what makes this book so extraordinary useful for me is the 134-page appendix in which the author has assembled a wellspring of sometimes hard-to-find data..thermal conductivity, specific heat, and thermal contraction, to name a few...for the commercial materials that one actually uses when designing sophisticated low temperature apparatus. Just how useful this appendix is was brought home to me when I wanted to compare the thermal conductivity of Be-Cu to that of stainless steel at 4 K. After giving Google a reasonable chance, I wasn't optimistic that I'd find the data in the book, but there it was in Table A6.7.Part III, 136 pages long, is dedicated to critical-current measurements in superconductors. This is quite a specialized subject that will probabaly be of interest to a considerably smaller number of readers than Part II, which deals with the general field of electrical transport measurements. However, for one who needs to enter this field, the same practical approach that the author used in the first two parts of the book, with its numerous graphs and figures, should enable the newcomer to start characterizing superconductors in the shortest time, from Nb3Sn to MgB2 to the high Tc's. Appendix 10 is a detailed review of critical-current analysis parameters.In addition to the compilation of extremely useful 'cold' data, the author introduces the chapters with a collection of 'warm' quotes, my favorite being "Measure twice, cut once or Cut twice and it's still too short." Even before you get started reading the chapter, you know it's going to be fun.