What, exactly, is cryogenics?
Shirron: In short, cryogenics is the study of materials at, and the production of, very cold temperature. It concerns both the refrigeration techniques that allow you to get down to very low temperature, and the knowledge and study of how materials change, different phenomena that crop up, and ways that those can be used in different situations to achieve a lot of different goals. As I said, superconductivity is the big one so, for example, knowing where things transition to the superconducting state, knowing what will destroy that state, knowing the properties of superconducting materials, is all part of what we consider to be cryogenics.
