Bubble Chamber - Drawbacks

Drawbacks

Although bubble chambers were very successful in the past, they are of only limited use in current very-high-energy experiments, for a variety of reasons:

• The need for a photographic readout rather than three-dimensional electronic data makes it less convenient, especially in experiments which must be reset, repeated and analyzed many times.
• The superheated phase must be ready at the precise moment of collision, which complicates the detection of short-lived particles.
• Bubble chambers are neither large nor massive enough to analyze high-energy collisions, where all products should be contained inside the detector.
• The high-energy particles' path radii may be too large to allow the precise estimation of momentum in a relatively small chamber.

Due to these issues, bubble chambers have largely been replaced by wire chambers, which allow particle energies to be measured at the same time. Another alternative technique is the spark chamber.