Expeditious Method for Measuring Specific Heat at Low Temperatures

Abstract This paper presents a quick and simple method for measuring specific heat at low temperatures. The proposed technique drastically reduces the measurement time to just 2.4 minutes for 140 data points—almost 120 times faster than the conventional thermal relaxation method, which takes 4.7 hours. Unlike traditional approaches which necessitate repeated thermal relaxation procedures at each data point, our method requires only a single thermal relaxation measurement across a broad temperature range, typically from 20 K down to 4 K. The effectiveness of this approach was demonstrated through the specific heat measurement of a representative superconductor niobium, Nb.