Flash tube used in Gargamelle. Gargamelle was the name given to a big bubble chamber built at the Saclay Laboratory in France during the late 1960s. It was designed principally for the detection at CERN of the elusive particles called neutrinos.Gargamelle is on display at CERN in the Microcosm garden.
Was used in ISR (Intersecting Storage Ring) split field magnet experiment. Multi-wire detectors contain layers of positively and negatively charged wires enclosed in a chamber full of gas. A charged particle passing through the chamber knocks negatively charged electrons out of atoms in the gas, leaving behind positive ions. The electrons are pulled towards the positively charged wires. They collide with other atoms on the way, producing an avalanche of electrons and ions. The movement of these electrons and ions induces an electric pulse in the wires which is collected by fast electronics. The size of the pulse is proportional to the energy loss of the original particle.
AOIP Paris. Type P12
Old. Made at CERN.
central region of the ion source for the synchro-cyclotron
Target support for the proton synchrotron. The Proton Synchrotron (PS) is the oldest and most versatile of CERN's accelerators. The PS was commissioned in 1959 and has been running continuously ever since. With a diameter of 200 metres and reaching a energy of 28 mev, it was for a while the most powerful accelerator in the world.
The UA2 central calorimeter measured the energy of individual particles created in proton-antiproton collisions. Accurate calibration allowed the W and Z masses to be measured with a precision of about 1%. The calorimeter had 24 slices like this one, each weighing 4 tons. The slices were arranged like orange segments around the collision point. Incoming particles produced showers of secondary particles in the layers of heavy material. These showers passed through the layers of plastic scintillator, generating light which was taken by light guides (green) to the data collection electronics. The amount of light was proportional to the energy of the original particle. The inner 23 cm of lead and plastic sandwiches measured electrons and photons; the outer 80 cm of iron and plastic sandwiches measured strongly interacting hadrons. The detector was calibrated by injecting light through optical fibres or by placing a radioactive source in the tube on the bottom edge.