Why is Liquid Neon Not Typically Used in Bubble Chamber Detectors?

[snorkack]

Is liquid neon popular for bubble chamber detectors?

 

[jtbell]

"Is?" Are bubble chambers still a thing?

I don't have any statistics on how popular neon was as a bubble-chamber medium, but I can provide one data point. My dissertation was based on an experiment which studied ##\bar \nu_\mu## interactions in the Fermilab 15-foot bubble chamber which was (for that experiment, in the late 1970s) filled with a mixture of 64% neon and 36% hydrogen (by number of atoms).

 

[websterling]

Are bubble chambers still a thing?

Actually, there's a bubble chamber in use at JLAB. It is filled with super-heated Nitrous Oxide It uses ~8 MeV photons produced at the injector for CEBAF to study the photo-disintegration of oxygen into helium and carbon. This is the inverse of the astrophysical process of Helium-Carbon fusion to Oxygen. Data is taken by a 100 frames/sec digital camera and a microphone to record the 'pings' of the bubbles.

https://wiki.jlab.org/ciswiki/index.php/Bubble_Chamber
https://wiki.jlab.org/ciswiki/index.php/Bubble_Chamber
https://wiki.jlab.org/ciswiki/images/6/6a/Bubble_OpenHouse_April2016.pdf

 

[snorkack]

Hydrogen and neon are good for their separate purposes.
Liquid protium bubble chamber is a detector which contains only lone nucleons, and no nuclei. That´s not the case with any other device - fog chamber (unless it´s hydrogen near its condensation point...), photographic emulsion, CCD - all of them contain nuclei. Liquid protium does not. Every interaction is with a lone proton, or spontaneous decay. Correct?

 

[jtbell]

One can also have interactions with the electrons that accompany the protons in neutral hydrogen. Slide 16 of this presentation shows the bubble-chamber photograph on which weak neutral-current scattering of a (anti)neutrino from an electron was first observed in the early 1970s. This is ##\bar \nu_\mu e \rightarrow \bar \nu_\mu e## via an intermediate virtual ##Z^0##. The signature is a single outgoing electron track appearing all by itself, the "incoming" atomic electron and the incoming and outgoing neutrinos being invisible.

 

[snorkack]

Yes - there will always be electrons in target.
Bubble chamber and cloud chamber are the two types of detectors that could possibly consist of a pure element, so you might ensure that there is a single type of target around.
The stable pure elements with low boiling point are as follows:

1. H₂ - 20K/-253C
2. He - 4K/-269C
3. N₂ - 77K/-196C
4. O₂ - 90K/-183C
5. F₂ - 85K/-188C
6. Ne - 27K/-246C
7. Cl₂ - 239K/-34C
8. Ar - 87K/-186C
9. Br₂ - 332K/59C
10. Kr - 120K/-153C
11. Xe - 165K/-108C

 

[Vanadium 50]

Bubble chamber and cloud chamber are the two types of detectors that could possibly consist of a pure element

1. HPGE
2. Silicon
3. Transition Edge Sensor (for superconducting elements)

 

[mfb]

4. Time projection chambers, drift chambers and similar gas detectors if we ignore the electrodes and readout electronics (but bubble chambers and cloud chambers need some support structure as well). You typically don't run them with a single gas but it would not be completely impossible.

 

[Vanadium 50]

And why you don't typically run gas TPCs with single elements, you do with liquid TPCs, typically Argon and Xenon. I think there may have been a few small Krypton ones, despite Krypton being far from ideal.