Outreach: Motivation (asif we need any?!)
The Wilson Laboratory maintains an Outreach effort which is mainly geared to educating undergraduate
students who work at the laboratory during the summer and for visitors who
wish to tour (site
has some cool mpegs!)the lab.
Some of us, including myself, having given the tours and supervised summer
students, felt that we needed to explain to the community more about particle
physics in general - rather than just about our laboratory which tends to
become overwhelming to a non scientest.
We decided to build a large, portable cloud chamber and, with permission from the
Ithaca Sciencenter, would display
it there as well as our laboratory.
We wrote a successful grant proposal to the
American Physical Society (APS)
, New York Chapter for a Physics Outreach Grant.
Outreach: Continuously sensitive Cloud chamber
A continuously sensitive cloud chamber consists of a liquid of low vapor
pressure in a steep temperature gradient. We use the vapour ethanol. Within
this gradient the vapors for a supersaturated layer. This is highly
vulnerable to irregularites that trigger nucleation. These irregularities
may come in the form of dust particles, mechanical pressure variations,
or more specifically for our purpose, cosmic rays. First invented about
100 years ago to study atmospheric clouds in a laboratory, scientests
found strange tracks being formed in their chambers and cosmic rays were
discovered.
In time, I will add more information and links on cloud chambers in general
and the whole business of cosmic rays, an active area of fundamental physics
research.
Here are some related links.
- The proposal that got us the seed money and got everything moving.
- Final REU(summer student) report by our summer students Sam Pruitt and Mike Simpson.
- Update on the project.
Some recent photos of the final chamber in progress. What you see in the photographs are different views of the larege (2' X 2) cold Cu plate powered by a dual-stage refrigerator. The plate has been observed to go down to -50C!. It
was designed and build at the Cornell Airconditioning and Refrigeration Shop (AC&R) - mainly by Steve Palmer.
- If you want to build your own table top cloud chamber,click here!
Naresh Menon menon@lns.cornell.edu
Some recent photos of the final chamber in progress. What you see in the photographs are different views of the larege (2' X 2) cold Cu plate powered by a dual-stage refrigerator. The plate has been observed to go down to -50C!. It
was designed and build at the Cornell Airconditioning and Refrigeration Shop (AC&R) - mainly by Steve Palmer.