Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes about the hardware for cooling material to low temperatures and some of the cooling techniques. It then focuses on some special cryogenic design methods contains an updating of Eric Smith's recipe chapter of 1981. The book contains discussions of some of the specialized instrumentation techniques we have used for experiments here at Cornell. During the 1985 term David McQueeney gave a lecture on the use of computers to control experiments and manage data. David's compendium of data analysis and presentation techniques is sold as the software package called PLOT by New Unit, Incorporated of Ithaca, NY. Oxford Instruments successfully started up and demonstrated two new dilution refrigerators in our laboratory with essentially no other instrumentation than bourdon gauges and the gamma ray anisotropy.