Berne Infinitesimal Bubble Chamber

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Working with the BIBC chamber at CERN. Working with BIBC.jpg
Working with the BIBC chamber at CERN.

The Berne Infinitesimal Bubble Chamber, BIBC, was almost pocket size, 6.5 centimetres across and with a visible volume containing about a wine glass of heavy liquid.

Bubble chambers are similar to cloud chambers, both in application and in basic principle. A chamber is normally made by filling a large cylinder with a liquid heated to just below its boiling point. As particles enter the chamber, a piston suddenly decreases its pressure, and the liquid enters into a superheated, metastable phase. Charged particles create an ionization track, around which the liquid vaporizes, forming microscopic bubbles. Bubble density around a track is proportional to a particle's energy loss. Bubbles grow in size as the chamber expands, until they are large enough to be seen or photographed. Several cameras are mounted around it, allowing a three-dimensional image of an event to be captured.

The BIBC chamber body was machined from a block of aluminium. It was filled with propane or freon. The chamber was designed to look for charmed particles, which are so un-stable that they usually decay too quickly to give big bubble chambers a good chance of catching them. In fact the track of a charmed particle could be lost amongst the 'large' (half a millimetre) bubbles of large chambers. The bubbles in the minichamber were about ten times smaller, and stood a better chance of picking up short tracks. [1] BIBC was used at the CERN SPS in the experiment NA18 as vertex detector together with a downstream 2 m streamer chamber of the MPI-Munich which allowed for momentum analysis of the charged particles. [2]

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References

  1. "From BEBC to LEBC and now BIBC" (PDF). CERN Bulletin. Geneva: CERN. 1980-03-03. p. 1.
  2. Ramseyer, E.; Hahn, B.; Hugentobler, E. (1982). "BIBC, a high resolution heavy liquid miniature bubble chamber". Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. 201 (2–3): 335–340. Bibcode:1982NIMPR.201..335R. doi:10.1016/0167-5087(82)90561-0. ISSN   0167-5087.