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The BEBC chamber body. A superconducting
coil gave a 3.5 Tesla magnetic field over the
3.7 m long 35 m3 chamber. Notice
that the active chamber volume only constitutes
a small part of the overall installation.
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Glasers' invention was the
starting point of a 30 year long bubble chamber
epoque at the accelerator laboratories around the
world. The lead was taken by Luis Alvarez' group at
Berkeley and already in 1959 a 180 cm long hydrogen
filled bubble chamber, that with its cryogenic
equipment, magnet and support structures filled an
entire building, came into operation. With this
bubble chamber particles from the Berkeley 6 GeV
proton accelerator, the Bevatron, could be studied.
The liquid hydrogen was kept at a temperature of 26 K
(-247oC) and at an overpressure of about 4
atmospheres. There was a magnetic field in the
chamber and the curvature of a particle track reveals
charge and momentum of the particle.
The two largest bubble chamber
ever constructed was one at Fermilab outside Chicago
and BEBC (Big European Bubble Chamber) at CERN in
Geneva, both over 3 meters long. Not only hydrogen
with free protons was used as filling liquid, but
also heavier material like propane and xenon were
used to study interactions in nuclei.
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The Nobel Prize in
Physics 1960 - Donald Arthur Glaser
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The Nobel Prize in
Physics 1968 - Luis Walter Alvarez
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