The first hydrogen bubble chamber
20 January 1999
This is a sketch of the first liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, dated January 25th, 1954. The basic idea of the bubble chamber - which makes the tracks of charged subatomic particles visible as a trail of bubbles in a superheated liquid - had been conceived by Donald Glaser in 1952. Glaser's first chamber had worked with diethyl ether, but liquid hydrogen offered the possibility of simpler particle interactions, as hydrogen nuclei consist only of single protons. However, the difficulty is that hydrogen is liquid only below -253 C! This first hydrogen device was built at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by John Wood and A.J. Schwemin in 1954. It was only 3.7 cm in diameter, but successfully demonstrated the formation of particle tracks. By 1959, the laboratory had progressed to the famous "72-inch" (180 cm) liquid hydrogen chamber, which made many important discoveries.
Credit: Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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