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Incoming links: Duncan Peck MacDougall
Duncan Peck MacDougall Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-11-05
Duncan Peck MacDougall worked with William Giauque on cooling by adiabatic demagnetization. Their 1933 experiment used gadolinium sulfate octahydrate and reached about , extending measurements below the temperatures available from conventional cryogenic liquids. The result required both a low-temperature apparatus and a magnetic field that could be reduced during an approximately adiabatic process.[ref]
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/biomems/wgiauque.html. Pitzer and Shirley, Giauque memoir: first adiabatic demagnetization experiment, March 1933; bibliography Phys. Rev.43,768
A chemist who served as deputy research director at the Explosives Research Laboratory.[ref]
Context and sources: Work at the Explosives Research Laboratory. Work at the Explosives Research Laboratory: oral-history recollection identifies physical chemist MacDougall; deputy research director paragraph
William Francis Giauque's 1949 lecture, Some Consequences of Low Temperature Research in Chemical Thermodynamics, credits Peter Debye with an independent proposal. It describes gadolinium sulfate octahydrate in a jacket immersed in liquid helium, with an external solenoid. Exchange gas conducts away heat during magnetization; evacuation isolates the sample before field reduction. A liquid-nitrogen shield reduces radiative heat transfer. Its photograph identifies the 1933 apparatus operated with Duncan Peck MacDougall. An inductance bridge reads the sample's magnetic susceptibility; measuring coils remain outside the evacuated jacket in liquid helium. Increasing magnetic susceptibility indicates cooling, but converting it to temperature using Curie's law becomes approximate as that law fails.[ref]
Some Consequences of Low Temperature Research in Chemical Thermodynamics by William Francis Giauque. Giauque, Nobel lecture, pp. 237–245, Figs. 16–20 and 23–25
The measurement logic deserves a separate check. A changed inductance alone is not an absolute temperature calibration: the sample geometry, applied measuring magnetic field, and constitutive response enter the inference. A modern control would compare the susceptibility-based thermometer with an independently calibrated thermometer over their common range, check recovery after repeated sweeps, and measure subsequent warming to bound incoming heat. These are proposed controls derived from the readout principle, rather than additional procedures attributed to the 1933 experiment. The historical working salt has a richer magnetic level structure than the illustrative two-level paramagnetic cooling model.