As a prize geek, I have always wanted to have a poster size copy of a bubble chamber photograph from physics experiment. Preferably one that is pretty and shows some historically important discovery. I have googled, but nothing comes up. Can anybody help in my search?
- Go to Google
2)Click on the “Images” tab - Enter ‘bubble chamber’ as a search term
4)Voila!
5)Take image to Kinko’s
6)Print on poster-sized paper
There’s a bubble chamber wallpaper on the Windows disk.
Install Themes and select Science.
Here’s a nice and big one:
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~werdna/nnh/technology/pics/BigEuropeanBubbleChamber.jpg
BTW, the image looks like plots from some chaos theory graphing or something, what is a bubble chamber? Are these repeated paths?
is the u.s. cover of The Strokes album, Is This It (http://www.shreddingradio.com/reviews12.html).
ive often wondered what in the hell that was.
man, you learn something innarestin’ every day in this place…
drhess: A bubble chamber is a device used to view the tracks of subatomic particles in a liquid medium. The process is similar to the way jets make contrails in the atmosphere at high altitudes.
A bubble chamber is somewhat similar to a cloud chamber, which were discussed here fairly recently.
The idea is that you have a chamber filled with liquid, with a piston at one end. You keep the liquid at a temperature above its usual boiling point, but under enough pressure so that bubbles don’t form. Suddenly drop the pressure and liquid goes into a state in which a subatomic particle passing through will trigger a trail of bubbles as it passes. Flash on lights and take photos. Then repeat the whole process over and over again.
This particular image has been mucked around with a bit to make it look flashier - and, indeed, more like fractal images. Most of the lines are tracks left by individual particles. This might be clearer in a more typical version of a photo from the same experiment; this page also explains what’s being seen in this other photo.
In a bit more detail, the experiment is the old Big European Bubble Chamber (BEBC) at CERN, which offhand I think was the biggest bubble chamber ever built. After it was finished, it was reinstalled outside the visitors centre there - thereby becoming the standard backdrop for group photos of tour parties, conference delegates and the like. As you can see, the main body was a big tank on legs. The big piston in the other photo on that page occupied the whole bottom of this tank. Meanwhile, the top of the inside of the tank used to look like this, with holes for the cameras to take the photos. This whole thing sat at the end of a particle accelerator, with the beam of particles entering from the side.
What you’re seeing in the photograph is thus the view down through the tank towards the piston. There’s a beam coming in from the left, producing a collision with an atom in the liquid and most of the curves are the particles that are the debris from this bit of atom smashing. The lines are curved, because the whole tank is sitting in a magnetic field; this bends the paths of charged particles and allows people analysing the photo to identify what they are. However, if you look closely at either photo, you can also see some concentric circles and some nicely spaced lines radiating from them. I’m fairly sure this is the internal walls of the tank and the end of the piston. The big fuzzy band that curves just to the right of the centre of the photo is just above one of these curves. My guess is therefore that this fuzzy band is turbulance or something along some seam in the tank, or where the piston meets the wall. And that fiddling with the contrast for artistic effect is highlighting it, even though it’s essentially background noise.
BEBC was pretty much the last of the breed and bubble chambers were replaced by electronic detectors, largely because they could read much more data and do so directly to tape for post-processing. The logjam with bubble chambers was the photos, since analysing them required a staff of technicians measuring everything by hand.