On November 24, Plug Power Inc., a leading provider of turnkey hydrogen solutions for the global green hydrogen market, announced it has been selected by Fertiglobe the strategic partnership between OCI NV and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and Scatec ASA, the Sovereign Fund of Egypt and Orascom Construction, as the technology provider for a 100 megawatts electrolyzer to produce green hydrogen as feedstock for up to 90,000 tons of green ammonia production at EBIC in Ain Sokhna, Egypt.

If you think that the International Linear Collider (ILC) is going to be a one-trick pony for studying the Higgs boson, think again. In fact, think research for self-driving cars, think dark matter with axions or dark photons, customs X-rays in a tunnel, photon beams to create tetraquarks and pentaquarks, energy recovery… all these ideas and more were presented and discussed at the recent ILCX 2021 meeting, called into being by ILC International Development Team (IDT) physics and detectors chair Hitoshi Murayama.

On November 16, Intelliconnect/CryoCoax (CSA CSM), leaders in the manufacture of cryogenic cable assemblies, announced it has been appointed as a franchised stocking distributor by XMA Corporation-Omni Spectra® (CSA CSM) ​focusing on cryogenic products as well as standard attenuators and high frequency microwave components.

To control more qubits there needs to be a new way of thinking about quantum measurement systems, starting with the cryogenic system itself. For this, Bluefors is introducing a new cryogenic platform, called KIDE [k ɪ d ɛ]. KIDE will play an important role for future research and development of quantum computing. KIDE enables unprecedented expandability and access to meet the requirements of next level quantum computing, and it will enable more cooling power and flexibility than any ultra low temperature measurement system that has come before.

On October 8, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced nearly $8 million for nine cooperative projects that will complement existing H 2@Scale efforts and support DOE’s Hydrogen Shot goal to drive down the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% within the decade. The selected projects, or cooperative research and development agreements (CRADAs), will leverage the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) platform to enable the integration of hydrogen technologies in future energy systems.

A collaboration of researchers led by Cornell University has been awarded $22.5 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue gaining the fundamental understanding needed to transform the brightness of electron beams available to science, medicine and industry. The announcement was made on September 20.

In September, the 11.7 Tesla MRI of the Iseult project, the most powerful in the world for human imaging, has just unveiled its first images. They validate the entire process that has enabled, thanks to multiple technological breakthroughs, the transformation of an “outstanding” magnet, delivered in 2017 to the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) Paris-Saclay site, into an “imager.”

It is becoming common for large-scale scientific projects to include cryogenic systems provided by other countries. Examples of this include CERN, the European Spallation Source, ITER and the PIP II project at Fermilab (CSA CSM). While these contributions are quite valuable, one of the big challenges in such projects is understanding which safety regulations are relevant and how to apply them. This is true even in situations where common standards, for example within the European Union, should apply.

The bar for getting the suffix of PhD after your name is high – you have to fundamentally change the philosophy in a field. As a faculty member responsible for training some of these individuals, I’m sometimes faced with the conundrum that advancing the philosophy implies that I have to change the way I was doing things. Thanks to newly minted Dr. Carl Bunge, I’m now trying to re-teach myself statistical thermodynamics while learning optics from scratch.