Fermilab Bubble Chamber Particle Collision Photo

Fragments of the Universe: Inside Fermilab's 15-Foot Bubble Chamber This frame of photographic film captures a rare glimpse of exotic subatomic processes that were unleashed within Fermilab’s legendary 15-Foot Bubble Chamber.  Built in the early 1970s, this colossal detector was a marvel of particle physics, filled with liquid hydrogen (at -253°C, only 20 degrees above 0 Kelvin), poised on the edge of boiling by displacement of a giant piston in 1/60th of a second, which superheated the entire 380 thousand liters of fluid. Right at this moment, a beam of neutrinos, at relativistic energies near the speed of light, was directed into the chamber where some collided with the hydrogen nuclei. Each wisp represents the trajectory of a charged subatomic particle, marked by bubbles that formed where the energetic particle had ripped electrons off hydrogen atoms, creating a string of ions, each becoming a nucleating point for a bubble to form. The liquid-to-gas phase transition is a natural am