A refrigeration cycle, also known as heat pump, is a thermodynamic cycle that allows the removal of heat from a low temperature heat source and the rejection of heat into a high temperature heat source, thanks to mechanical power consumption. Traditional refrigeration cycles are subcritical, with the high pressure side (where heat rejection occurs) below the critical pressure.
Innovative transcritical refrigeration cycles, instead, should use a working fluid whose critical temperature is around the ambient temperature. For this reason, carbon dioxide is chosen due to its favourable critical conditions. In fact, the critical point of carbon dioxide is  31°C, reasonably in between the hot source and cold source of traditional refrigeration applications, thus suitable for a transcritical applications.
In transcritical refrigeration cycles the heat is dissipated through a gas cooler instead of a desuperheater and a condenser like in subcritical cycles. This limits the plant components, plant complexity and costs of the power block.
The advantages of using supercritical carbon dioxide as working fluid, instead of traditional refrigerant fluids (like HFC of HFO), in refrigeration cycles is represented both by economic aspects and environmental ones. The cost of carbon dioxide is two order of magnitude lower than the ones of the average refrigerant working fluid and the environmental impact of carbon dioxide is very limited (with a GWP of 1 and an ODP of 0), the fluid is not reactive nor significantly toxic. No other working fluids for refrigeration is able to reach the same environmental favourable characteristics of carbon dioxide.