Droplets of liquid deposited on the ions make visible the trace of a passing particle-track, which makes it possible to photograph it. You can determine the energy of a particle by the length of the track, and estimate its speed by the number of droplets per unit length of the track. Placing the camera in a magnetic field allows you to determine the ratio of the charge of a particle to its mass from the curvature of the track (first proposed by the Soviet physicists P. L. Kapitsa and D. V. Skobeltsyn).
Cloud chamber
The Wilson camera is a track-based particle detector. Created by C. Wilson in 1912. With the help of the Wilson camera, a number of discoveries were made in nuclear physics and particle physics, such as the discovery of broad atmospheric showers (in the region of cosmic rays) in 1929, the positron in 1932, the detection of traces of muons, the discovery of strange particles. In the future, the Wilson chamber was almost replaced by the bubble chamber as a faster-acting one. The Wilson chamber is a vessel filled with water or alcohol vapors close to saturation (see Fig.). Its action is based on the condensation of supersaturated steam (water or alcohol) on ions formed by a flying particle. Oversaturated steam is created by a sharp lowering of the piston (see Fig.) (the steam in the chamber thus expands adiabatically, so that its temperature rises sharply).
Droplets of liquid deposited on the ions make visible the trace of a passing particle-track, which makes it possible to photograph it. You can determine the energy of a particle by the length of the track, and estimate its speed by the number of droplets per unit length of the track. Placing the camera in a magnetic field allows you to determine the ratio of the charge of a particle to its mass from the curvature of the track (first proposed by the Soviet physicists P. L. Kapitsa and D. V. Skobeltsyn).
Droplets of liquid deposited on the ions make visible the trace of a passing particle-track, which makes it possible to photograph it. You can determine the energy of a particle by the length of the track, and estimate its speed by the number of droplets per unit length of the track. Placing the camera in a magnetic field allows you to determine the ratio of the charge of a particle to its mass from the curvature of the track (first proposed by the Soviet physicists P. L. Kapitsa and D. V. Skobeltsyn).