Topic: Scientific Picture of the Week

[sam]

This is the first image produced by the Large Hadron Collider, showing some of the first protons accelerated earlier this week. I know its not the most breath taking on images but its still quite cool. This wasn't the heads-on collision experiment that some crazy people think will destroy the Earth, this will come later in the year.

[Simon]

Umm.... interesting!   

[Clive]

Very cool indeed Sam!

[GillE]

It looks as if the particles are following some sort of magnetic field pattern, rather like the shape of dumbells.  How intriguing.

[sam]

It looks as if the particles are following some sort of magnetic field pattern, rather like the shape of dumbells.  How intriguing.

well they do follow magnetic fields as they are charged, well noticed - have you ever seen a bubble chamber experiment?

[GillE]

No, I haven't seen a bubble chamber experiment but I googled and came up with this piccy:



What's it all about (Alfieeeee) ?

[sam]

Wiki gives a good description:

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.

Anecdotally, Glaser was inspired by the bubbles in a glass of beer; however, in a 2006 talk, he refuted this story,[1] saying that although beer was not the inspiration for the bubble chamber, he did experiments using beer to fill early prototypes.

Essentially what you are seeing is the photographic plate of all the electrically charged particles tracks as they pass through the vessel, pretty cool! From the way they move you are able to determine what type of particle it is. The CERN site has some interesting info - http://teachers.web.cern.ch/teachers/archiv/HST2005/bubble_chambers/BCwebsite/index.htm