Bubble Chamber Pictures for the Classroom

Description

Dive into the fascinating world of bubble chambers and explore how particle physicists used them to study high-energy particles. Using authentic CERN photographs, students can analyse the curved tracks left behind by charged particles and apply fundamental physics concepts to identify them.

This resource includes guided activities that help students interpret particle motion, charge and momentum through visual data. It’s a powerful way to introduce topics like magnetic fields, conservation of momentum and particle transformations using real-world examples from CERN. Click here to discover how the photographs in this activity were originally analysed at CERN.

Material list

Below you can find the materials you need to run the activity.

• Student worksheet with solutions and additional information for teachers (files are available for download in this record).
• Scissors
• Glue
• Ruler
• Pen or pencil
• Pocket calculator

Instructions

The worksheet contains the full instructions for the activity.

Related resources

• Click here to read the article accompanying the classroom activity. Several relevant resources are linked at the end of the article.
• The images in the activity were produced by the 2 m-long bubble chamber at CERN in 1972.
  • Scans of the original photographs, as well as images with coloured tracks can be found here.
• Explore how a different detector, the Cloud chamber, visualises charged particles using supersaturated alcohol vapour.