If you think it's been cold outside this winter, that's nothing compared to the deep freeze setting in at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the early-universe-recreating "atom smasher" at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Brookhaven's accelerator physicists have begun pumping liquid helium into RHIC's 1,740 superconducting magnets to chill them to near absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius—the coldest anything can get) in preparation for the collider's next physics run.
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