Bubble Chamber Pictures for the Classroom

Bubble Chamber

Bubble chambers were the dominant experimental tools of particle physicists in the 1950s and 60s. They supplanted cloud chambers and lead to the Nobel Prize in Physics 1960. Bubble chambers and cloud chambers work in a very similar way. And although it is not possible to build a bubble chamber in the classroom, students can analyse bubble chamber tracks and learn more about particle identification, e.g. after having built and observed cloud chambers.

Woithe, J., Schmidt, R., Naumann, F. (2018). Student worksheet & solutions: Bubble chamber pictures. docx, pdf (version 12-03-2018)

This worksheet is based on images recorded by the 2 m bubble chamber at CERN on 10 August 1972. The bubble chamber was exposed to a beam of protons from CERN’s proton synchrotron PS with a momentum of 24 GeV/c. The original pictures as well as the pictures with coloured tracks can be found online: https://cds.cern.ch/record/2307419

Read more about this classroom activity in 'Science in School': Woithe, J., Schmidt, R., Naumann, F. (2019). Track inspection: how to spot subatomic particles, Science in School, 46, page 40-47