Finally snow! Snow is not a really frequent thing in Hamburg. We have a very maritime climate here, so winters are usually gray and rainy. But this morning when I got up and looked out of the window, everything was white. Beautiful. So and here you see the real cold ILC.
As you might know, the technology for the International Linear Collider is based on superconducting accelerating cavities. Superconductivitiy is a nice feature of nature which appears in certain materials, like the metal Niob out of which the accelerating structures, the heart of the ILC, are made. If Niob is cooled down to real deep temperatures, like -270 degrees Centigrade (what's that in Fahrenheit?), its electrical resistance vanishes. This allows the almost loss-less storage of electromagnetic energy in the Niob structures which helps a lot in accelerating the particles. To get down to such cold temperatures of course snow is not sufficient for cooling. To get down to -270 degrees one has to use liquid Helium.
Ok, that's the physics lesson for today. Unfortunately the snow already melts away outside. So I guess we are back to the gray and rainy defaults.
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