Liquid helium of liquid water. Helium was first liquefied on July 10, 1908, by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. At that time, helium-3 was unknown because the mass spectrometer had not yet been invented. In more recent decades, liquid helium has been used as a cryogenic refrigerant, and liquid helium is produced commercially for use in superconducting magnets such as those used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Magnetoencephalography (MEG), and experiments in physics, such as low temperature Mössbauer spectroscopy. The temperature required to produce liquid helium is low because
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