Liquid Helium is used widely, from hospitals to characterization of materials at low temperatures. Many experiments at low temperatures require liquid Helium, particularly when vibration isolation precludes the use of cryocoolers and when one needs to cool heavy equipment such as superconducting coils. Here we describe methods to simplify the operations required to use liquid Helium by eliminating the use of high pressure bottles, avoiding blockage and improving heating and cooling rates. First we show a simple and very low cost method to transfer liquid Helium from a transport container into a cryostat that uses a manual pump having pumping and pressurizing ports, giving a liquid Helium transfer rate of about 100 liters an hour. Second, we describe a closed cycle circuit of Helium gas cooled in an external liquid nitrogen bath that allows precooling a cryogenic experiment without inserting liquid nitrogen into the cryostat, eliminating problems associated to the presence of nitrogen around superconducting magnets. And third, we show a sliding seal assembly and an inner vacuum chamber design that allows inserting large experiments into liquid Helium.

The magnetoresistance (MR) of iron pnictide superconductors is often dominated by electron–electron correlations and deviates from the H 2 or saturating behaviors expected for uncorrelated metals. Contrary to similar Fe-based pnictide systems, the superconductor LaRu2P2 (T c = 4 K) shows no enhancement of electron–electron correlations. Here we report a non-saturating MR deviating from the H 2 or saturating behaviors in LaRu2P2. We present results in single crystals of LaRu2P2, where we observe a MR following H 1.3 up to 22 T. We discuss our result by comparing the bandstructure of LaRu2P2 with that of Fe based pnictide superconductors. The different orbital structures of Fe and Ru leads to a 3D Fermi surface with negligible bandwidth renormalization in LaRu2P2, that contains a large open sheet over the whole Brillouin zone. We show that the large MR in LaRu2P2 is unrelated to the one obtained in materials with strong electron–electron correlations and that it is compatible instead with conduction due to open orbits on the rather complex Fermi surface structure of LaRu2P2.