Cryogenics

Three international low temperature conferences were held in Europe in 1978: a physics conference, an engineering conference, and a materials conference. The intended coverage of this cryogenics chapter is just about coextensive with the subject areas which were treated at these meetings, so far as they concerned dielectrics. Contributions to LT15 (1) or ICEC7 (2), the latest of two major conference series will be referred to under practically all the different subheadings of the chapter. Cryogenic space engineering was given some prominence at ICEC7 amongst the more usual topics. The ICMC symposium (3) was the first such meeting to deal exclusively with non-metallic materials at low temperatures. The major topic was low temperature structural materials, and especially composites, with thermal and electrical insulating materials as important minor topics. We shall also be referring to the proceedings of a Lattice Dynamics conference (4) and of dielectric conferences not specifically concerned with low temperatures (5,6). In this introductory section we shall draw attention to a few pertinent publications of general or miscellaneous interest before dealing with the more specialised topics.