New Supercool Alloy Could Take The Heat Off Helium-3

Chinese researchers have made a new alloy called EuCo₂Al₉ that can cool to almost absolute zero without using the rare helium 3.

The alloy works with adiabatic demagnetization refrigeration: a strong magnetic field first lines up the material’s magnetic moments, then the field is turned off. When the field is removed, the moments become disordered and take in heat, which lowers the temperature.

Unlike older ADR materials, this alloy is both very cold and good at conducting heat. It acts as a solid‑state refrigerator that has no moving parts. In lab tests it reached about 106 millikelvin, the same temperature that helium 3 dilution refrigerators achieve.

This advance could lead to lighter, cheaper, and portable cryogenic devices. It would help speed up the use of quantum computers, sensors, and space‑borne electronics while removing a critical supply bottleneck.