Lowest temperature recorded on Earth

[2] The result was reported at the 46th annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California, in December 2013; it is a provisional figure, and may be subject to revision.

More recent work[5] shows many locations in the high Antarctic where surface temperatures drop to approximately −98 °C (−144 °F; 175 K).

[7] The next reliable measurement was made during the 1957 season at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, yielding −73.6 °C (−100.5 °F; 199.6 K) on 11 May and −74.5 °C (−102.1 °F; 198.7 K) on 17 September.

[6] The next world record low temperature was a reading of −88.3 °C (−126.9 °F; 184.8 K), measured at the Soviet Vostok Station in 1968, on the Antarctic Plateau.

In 1904 Dutch scientist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes created a special lab in Leiden in the Netherlands with the aim of producing liquid helium.

[citation needed] The corresponding peak emission will be in radio waves, rather than in the familiar infrared, so it is very inefficiently absorbed by neighboring atoms, making it difficult to reach thermal equilibrium.

The first uses a helium dilution refrigerator to get to temperatures of millikelvins, then the next stage uses adiabatic nuclear demagnetisation to reach picokelvins.

[11] Extremely low temperatures are useful for observation of quantum mechanical phases of matter such as superfluids and Bose–Einstein condensates, which would be disrupted by thermal motion.