A bubble chamber is a vessel filled with a superheated transparent liquid (most often liquid hydrogen) used to detect electrically charged particles moving through it. It was invented in 1952 by Donald A. Glaser, for which he was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics. Supposedly, Glaser was inspired by the bubbles in a glass of beer; however, in a 2006 talk, he refuted this story, saying that although beer was not the inspiration for the bubble chamber, he did experiments using beer to fill early prototypes.
Cloud chambers work on the same principles as bubble chambers, only they are based on supersaturated vapor rather than superheated liquid. While bubble chambers were extensively used in the past, they have now mostly been supplanted by wire chambers and spark chambers. Historically, notable bubble chambers include the Big European Bubble Chamber (BEBC) and Gargamelle.
Read more about Bubble Chamber: Function and Use, Drawbacks
Famous quotes containing the words bubble and/or chamber:
“Each swung in danger on its slender twig,
A bubble on a pipestem, growing big.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“But it is the same thing we are all seeing,
Our world. Go after it,
Go get it boy, says the man holding the stick.
Eat, says the hunger, and we plunge blindly in again,
Into the chamber behind the thought.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)