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A cloud chamber, also known as a Wilson cloud chamber, is a particle detector used for visualizing the passage of ionizing radiation. A cloud chamber consists of a sealed environment containing a supersaturated vapor of water or alcohol.
Looking into a cloud chamber you see the tracks of electrically charged particles as they pass through the chamber. The space inside the chamber is filled with alcohol vapour and, as a particle passes through, tiny droplets of alcohol form, showing up its track.
Cloud chamber, radiation detector, originally developed between 1896 and 1912 by the Scottish physicist C.T.R. Wilson, that has as the detecting medium a supersaturated vapour that condenses to tiny liquid droplets around ions produced by the passage of energetic charged particles, such as alpha.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Nonetheless, the cloud chamber is still a very valuable tool to look at particle interactions. In this experiment you will use a version of the Wilson Cloud Chamber [1] to study several aspects of both the operation of the chamber itself and the use of the chamber to explore the nature of the particles.
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A cloud chamber makes the invisible visible, allowing us to see delicate, wispy proof that there are tiny particles whose story starts in outer space shooting through all of us, every minute of every day.
The cloud chamber provided a device for studying the collisions between free particles and the decay of particles in flight. The cloud chamber found use in particle physics until the invention of the bubble chamber in 1952 by D. A. Glaser. Radiation detection.
The cloud chamber was developed by C.T.R. Wilson at the turn of the century (he received the Nobel Prize in 1927 for his invention). When charged particles ionize a supersaturated vapor, a trail of ions is left in the path of the particles.
