What Is a Bubble Chamber?

The Bubble Chamber is an effective instrument invented by American physicist Donald A. Glaser in 1952 to detect the track of high-energy charged particles ^[1] .

Bubble chamber

The bubble chamber is composed of a closed container. The container contains the working liquid. The liquid undergoes adiabatic expansion at a specific temperature and pressure. Because the liquid is in a superheated state within a certain time interval (for example, 50ms), the liquid will not immediately boil. If there are high-speed charged particles passing through the liquid, low-energy electrons are continuously generated by collisions with the liquid atoms on the trajectory of the charged particles, thereby forming ion pairs. These ions will cause local heating when they are recombined, and form embryos with these ions as the core. Bubbles, after a short period of time, the embryo's bubbles gradually grow, leaving traces along the path of the particles ^[4]

Particles such as 0, 0, +, - and hundreds of resonance particles were found in the bubble chamber. It can also be used to detect the decay of various types of particles ^[1-2]

When the working liquid in a closed container undergoes adiabatic expansion at a specific temperature and pressure, it can be in a superheated metastable state within a certain time interval (usually about 50 milliseconds) without boiling immediately; at this time, if high-energy charged particles pass through In the flight path of particles, they collide with atoms in the liquid to generate low-energy electrons ( rays), which results in many ion pairs. These ion pairs cause local heating or hot needles during recombination, thereby forming embryonic bubbles. ^[4]

The advantages of the bubble chamber itself are intuitive, the action apex (sometimes even the decay apex) is visible, it has good multiple efficiency, large effective space, high measurement accuracy, and so on. However, there are disadvantages to the bubble chamber, such as the slow collection and analysis of data, especially scanning and measuring photos (although in the case of using automated dosing devices), which are too time-consuming, the volume is not easy to make large, and it is not easy to adapt to the increasing energy. The higher, the smaller the cross section of the action to be studied, the more experimental requirements for the number of cases. The combination of a holographic bubble chamber and an electronic spectrometer is currently being developed ^{[1] [4]} .