Abstract
The resonant-mass technique for the detection of gravitational waves may involve, in the near future, the cooling of very large masses (about 100 tons) from room temperature (300 K) to extreme cryogenic temperatures (20 mK). To cool these detectors to cryogenic temperatures an exchange gas (helium) is used, and the heat is removed from the antenna to the cold reservoir by thermal conduction and natural convection. With the current technique, cooling times of about 1 month can be obtained for cylindrical bar antennas of 2.5 tons. Should this same technique be used to cool a 100 ton spherical antenna the cooling time would be about 10 months, making the operation of these antennas impracticable.In this paper, we study the above-mentioned cooling technique and others, such as thermal switching and forced convection from room temperature to liquid nitrogen temperature (77 K) using an aluminium truncated icosahedron of 19 kg weight and 25 cm diameter.
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