Leiden University at the university. The learning and reputation of Jacobus Gronovius, Herman Boerhaave, Tiberius Hemsterhuis and David Ruhnken, among others, enabled Leiden to maintain its reputation for excellence down to the end of the 18th century. At the end of the nineteenth century, Leiden University again became one of Europe's leading universities. At the world’s first university low-temperature laboratory, professor Heike Kamerlingh Onnes achieved temperatures of only one degree above absolute zero of −273 degrees Celsius. In 1908 he was also the first to succeed in liquifying helium and can be credited with the discovery of the superconductivity in metals. The
Giacinto Scoles conducted experiments on isotope separation during physical adsorption (physisorption). In 1961, he changed research area and joined Jan Beenakker’s group at the Kamerlingh-Onnes Laboratorium of Leiden University in the Netherlands. There he coauthored one of the very first papers [1] on what became soon known as the Senftleben-Beenakker effect: The influence of an external magnetic or electric field on the transport properties of dilute polyatomic gases. The idea behind this effect is that every polyatomic molecule – even a simple paramagnetic one like N – has a magnetic moment, due to its end-over-end rotation, which can be used as a