About the
Image
The
image to the right is an artfully colored photograph of charged particle
tracks in a detector called a bubble chamber. The liquid, usually hydrogen,
is brought to a superheated state (at a temperature above boiling) where the
liquid can't change to gas without a seed of some kind for the bubbles to
form on. A charged particle, through electromagnetic interactions, will cause
atoms in its path to lose electrons and become ions. These ions become the
seed of the small bubbles that mark the trajectories of the subatomic
particles. |
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The
tracks are curved due to the presence of a magnetic field. The amount of curve
to each track depends on the speed and mass of the particle and the strength
of the magnetic field. In the two panels to the right we see an original
bubble chamber photo and the reconstructed physics of an Omega minus particle
produced by the collision of a K minus with a proton from the hydrogen. The
Omega minus then decays into an array of particles, some of
which subsequently also decay. Some of the decay products of the Omega
minus are not charged (dashed lines) thus do not produce ions or bubbles, but
are given away when they decay to a pair of charged particles. |
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©
2008 Raymond E Hall