Experimental Glass Bubble Chamber
date: label: Date made
content: Spring, 1952
name: label: maker
content: Glaser, D.A.
notes: label: Description
content: Gift of Donald A. Glaser
label: Description
content: Before the Second World War no particle accelerator had reached 20 million volts. Immediately after the war several synchrocyclotrons of ten times greater energy were built, and physicists looked forward to energies ten times greater still. About 1950, with billion-volt synchrotrons under construction at Brookhaven and Berkeley, a young physicist at the University of Michigan undertook to develop a chamber-type detector more suitable than the cloud chamber for use with the extremely penetrating, pulsed beams from these new accelerators. The outcome was Donald Glaser’s bubble chamber—and a Nobel Prize.
label: Description
content: Donald Arthur Glaser (September 21, 1926 – February 28, 2013) drew up a long list of instabilities that, triggered by the passage of a charged particle, might result in a visible trace of the particle’s path. He chose as most promising the formation of bubbles in a superheated liquid. Encouraging calculations were followed by an experimental investigation. He showed that liquid ether held quiescent above its normal boiling point by the application of pressure may remain so for long times after the pressure is released. In a smooth, clean glass bulb boiling begins only when triggered by radiation; initially the bubbles form as fine strings along the tracks of ionizing particles.
label: Description
content: (An appealing story has it that Glaser’s idea came to him as he contemplated bubbles rising in a glass of beer. Alas, Glaser himself has firmly denied it.)
label: Description
content: For his earliest experiments Glaser’s apparatus was a glass tube with an elongated bulb at each end, partially filled with ether. Pressure was applied, or relieved, simply by heating, or cooling, the bulbs. In the summer of 1952, Glaser’s first graduate student, David Rahm, built a hand-crank apparatus for mechanical compression of the ether in a single bulb. This bulb, one of a set of four, the earliest surviving, was used with that apparatus. After a number of trials with a high-speed motion picture camera, Glaser and Rahm succeeded in photographing a track of a cosmic ray.
label: Description
content: For a year and a half bubble chambers remained such tiny glass bulbs. Tiny, because at the pressures required—20 atmospheres, for ether—larger glass chambers would rupture. Glass, because any edge or dirt triggered boiling of the superheated liquid. Glaser’s attempts to construct larger chambers of metal with plate glass windows remained unsuccessful until Luis Alvarez’ coworkers at Berkeley showed that by relieving the pressure in the chamber very rapidly, it was possible to obtain tracks, and photograph them, before the boiling initiated at the walls, gaskets, etc., could interfere.
label: Description
content: Reference:
label: Description
content: Vettel, Eric (2006). "Donald Glaser: The Bubble Chamber, Bioengineering, Business Consulting, and Neurobiology – an oral history conducted in 2003–2004" (PDF). Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Medicine and Science: Modern Physics
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 1977.0994.02
label: accession number
content: 1977.0994
label: catalog number
content: 1977.0994.02
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Bubble Chamber, Glaser Glass
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 34 cm x 12 cm x 4 cm; 13 3/8 in x 4 3/4 in x 1 9/16 in