bubble chamber neutrino experiment

CERN Accelerating science

The lighter side of neutrino experiments.

A buzz of excitement marked the start of neutrino experiments at CERN in 1963. As many years of hard work were about to be put to the test, this spoof advertisement appeared on the concrete shielding near the heavy liquid bubble chamber.

CERN inventions such as the fast ejection system, proposed in 1959 by Berend Kuiper and Günther Plass, and the magnetic horn, which earned Simon van der Meer his share of the Nobel prize for physics in 1984, had enabled CERN to produce the most intense beam of neutrinos in the world. The first run in June was anxiously awaited, but everything ran smoothly. During seven weeks a total of 4000 events were observed in the spark chamber and 360 in the bubble chamber, comparing very favourably with the 56 spark chamber events found in the previous neutrino experiment in Brookhaven.

CERN Accelerating science

Forty years of neutral currents

On 19 July 1973, physicists working with the Gargamelle bubble chamber at CERN presented the first direct evidence of the weak neutral current

19 July, 2013

By Cian O'Luanaigh

The first example of a single-electron neutral current. An incoming antineutrino knocks an electron forwards (towards the left), creating a characteristic electronic shower with electron–positron pairs (Image: Gargamelle/CERN)

Forty years ago today, physicists working with the Gargamelle bubble chamber at CERN presented the first direct evidence of the weak neutral current. The result led to the discovery of the W and Z bosons, which carry the weak force – and ultimately to that of a Higgs boson announced last year.

Gargamelle was a bubble chamber at CERN designed to detect neutrinos. It was 4.8 metres long and 2 metres in diameter, weighed 1000 tonnes and held nearly 12 cubic metres of heavy-liquid freon (CF3Br).

In a seminar at CERN on 19 July 1973, Paul Musset of the Gargamelle collaboration presented the first direct evidence of the weak neutral current - a process predicted in the mid-1960s independently by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg - that required the existence of a neutral particle to carry the weak fundamental force. This particle, called the Z boson, and the associated weak neutral currents, were predicted by electroweak theory, according to which the weak force and the electromagnetic force are different versions of the same force.

The discovery involved the search for two types of events: one involved the interaction of a neutrino with an electron in the liquid, while in the other the neutrino scattered from a hadron (proton or neutron).  In the latter case, the signature of a neutral current event was an isolated vertex from which only hadrons were produced. By July 1973 the team had confirmed as many as 166 hadronic events, and one electron event. In both cases, the neutrino enters invisibly, interacts and then moves on, again invisibly.

Paul Musset presented the results of both hadronic and leptonic analyses at the seminar at CERN. The paper on the electron event had already been received by Physics Letters on 2 July ( F J Hasert et al. 1973a ); the paper on the hadronic events followed on 23 July ( F J Hasert et al. 1973b ). They were published together in the same issue of the journal on 3 September.

The discovery of weak neutral currents was a significant step toward the unification of electromagnetism and the weak force into the electroweak force.

In 1983, the UA1 and UA2 experiments at CERN confirmed the existence of the W and Z particles predicted by the theory of neutral currents.

Read more:   " Gargamelle: the tale of a giant discovery " – CERN Courier archive

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From Gargamelle to MINERvA: exploring the structure of the nucleon with neutrinos

• Regular Article
• Published: 27 October 2021
• Volume 230 , pages 4221–4241, ( 2021 )

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• Jorge G. Morfín   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9343-9351 1  

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Neutrino scattering experiments have been exploring the structure of the nucleon with Deep-Inelastic Scattering for over 50 years. Although hints of nucleon structure were available using CERN’s first neutrino beam in the 1960s, the study actually started quantitatively in the early 1970s with the Gargamelle heavy liquid bubble chamber that produced first neutrino confirmation of scaling. This study of nucleon structure continued with both bubble chambers and more massive electronic detectors that, with higher energy neutrino beams and \(Q^2\) reach, examined the breaking of this scaling while testing Quantum Chromodynamics. A significant factor when including neutrino explorations of nucleon structure in the overall picture is that to gather significant statistics, neutrino experiments have had to use heavier nuclear targets. It has been experimentally demonstrated that the structure of the nucleon in the nuclear environment is indeed different than the free nucleon structure. Understanding this modified structure has played an important part in the experimental and theoretical exploration of nucleon structure by neutrinos and is one of the important goals of the on-going MINERvA experiment at Fermilab.

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Due to publication limitations, this review will be representative rather than complete.

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Morfín, J.G. From Gargamelle to MINERvA: exploring the structure of the nucleon with neutrinos. Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top. 230 , 4221–4241 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00298-4

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Received : 20 July 2021

Accepted : 29 September 2021

Published : 27 October 2021

Issue Date : December 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00298-4

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History and Archives

How do scientists learn about the elusive neutrino.

Composite Photo of Neutrino Event

How do scientists learn about the elusive neutrino? This is a composite photograph showing one of the events found in the Fermilab 15-ft. Bubble Chamber during a run in which the Chamber was filled with neon and hydrogen, exposed to a beam of neutrinos, and recorded by Experiment #28A. A neutrino interaction is indicated at the vertex of the event.

View 1 is a photograph of the entire event. View 2 is a close-up of the vertex of the event shown in the rectangle outlined in View 1. View 3 is a schematic explanation of the event.

These events are interpreted by the experimenters as involving the production of a new particle in the neutrino interaction, a particle which then decays into a neutral K meson, a positron and an invisible neutrino. The original neutrino turns into a muon.

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