Gargamelle
Gargamelle was a particle detector at CERN in Geneva. It was a bubble chamber in which the traces of charged particles could be made visible.
The detector
Gargamelle was one of the largest bubble chambers ever built. It consisted of a horizontal cylinder, 4.8 meters long and 1.88 meters in diameter inside. It was filled with heavy, pressurized liquids in order to achieve the highest possible event rates for hard-to-detect particles such as neutrinos . Were used propane , freon or mixtures of these two substances, each of about 12,000 liters.
history
The construction of Gargamelle was proposed by André Lagarrigue in 1964 . In December 1965, CERN, the French CEA , the École polytechnique and the Orsay laboratory of the École normal supérieure agreed on the implementation of the project. The name of the detector was borrowed from a work by the Renaissance writer François Rabelais , Gargamelle is the name of a giantess.
The detector was built in the Saturne laboratory of the CEA in Saclay . In 1970 it was installed at CERN, the proton synchrotron served as the beam source . The first test runs with the detection of cosmic rays began in December .
From 1976 Gargamelle was operated at the Super Proton Synchrotron and was part of the West Area Neutrino Facility . After a crack in the chamber that occurred on October 26, 1978, the experiment was terminated in 1979 due to the expected repair effort. Today the chamber is in the Microcosm exhibition together with other former detectors, such as the BEBC . The hall used before 1976 was empty for 20 years and is now also used for the ATLAS detector.
Research program and results
In November 1968, at a conference in Milan, a priority list for research on Gargamelle was drawn up. It was led by the search for the W bosons , further topics were the investigation of deep inelastic scattering and form factors of atomic nuclei and the search for the Z boson and heavy leptons . From the beginning, Gargamelle was also designed to detect secondary particles after the passage of neutrinos.
The most important result of the experiment was the first detection of the Z boson and thus the neutral process of the weak interaction in 1973. In addition, important early results were obtained on neutrino-electron scattering. In 2011 , Dieter Haidt and Antonino Pullia received the Premio Enrico Fermi for their participation in the discovery of weak neutral currents at Gargamelle . Helmut Faissner was also involved . In 2009, the Gargamelle collaboration received the European Physical Society's High Energy and Particle Physics Prize for this discovery.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b CERN Bulletin 10/2000; 6 March 2000: A new lease of life for the Gargamelle hall ( Memento of the original from April 3, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ CERN Courier: Gargamelle's priorities ( Memento of the original dated December 3, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ particlephysics.ac.uk: Gargamelle - the mother of all bubble chambers? ( Memento of the original dated December 2, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
