Particle art

8 August 2001

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Art meets science in the swirling patterns created by the tracks of charged particles in the 7-foot bubble chamber, which in 1974 superceded the 80-inch bubble chamber at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Like its predecessor, the '7-foot' contained liquid hydrogen, but a new feature was to use for the first time a superconducting magnet to provide the magnetic field to bend the paths of the particles. Bubble chambers dominated particle physics imagery during the 1960s, but they were eventually made obsolete by modern detectors that could be made to record only specific patterns of tracks, and which could directly convert measurements on a track into numbers to feed into a computer, bypassing the need for a photographic scanning prodecure. (Coloured by Gary Schroeder, Brookhaven National Laboratory.)

Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory Media and Communciations Office

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