Gargamelle - the mother of all bubble chambers?

24 June 1998

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Gargamelle - the mother of all bubble chambers?
The Gargamelle of fiction may have been the mother of the giant Gargantua, but the Gargamelle of fact was a giant particle detector, which a quarter of a century ago was causing excitement at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva. Gargamelle was a bubble chamber built at the Saclay Laboratory in France during the late 1960s, and was designed principally for the detection at CERN of the elusive particles called neutrinos. A bubble chamber contains a liquid under pressure, which reveals the tracks of electrically charged particles as trails of tiny bubbles when the pressure is reduced. Neutrinos have no charge, and so leave no tracks, but the aim with Gargamelle was to "see neutrinos" by making visible any charged particles set in motion by the interaction of neutrinos in the liquid. Neutrinos interact very rarely, so Gargamelle was designed not only to be as big as possible, but also to work with a dense liquid - Freon (CF3Br) - in which neutrinos would be more likely to interact. The final chamber was a cylinder, 4.8 m long and 1.85 m wide, with a volume of 12 cubic metres. Here it is being installed within the coil (right) of the electromagnet that would provide a magnetic field to bend the tracks of charged particles according their momentum.

Credit: CERN Photo

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