Some photographs of the tracks of penetrating radiation

Abstract

We have recently developed a method by which the high speed particles associated with penetrating radiation can be made to take their own cloud photographs. By this means it is possible to obtain these photographs very much more speedily than by the usual method of making expansions at random. For when this latter method is used it is only on a small fraction of the photographs that a track will be found. The average number of photographs required to obtain one track will depend on the size and orientation of the chamber and on the effective time of expansion. The latter is not likely to be more than 1/20 second. From measurements with counters it is known that about 1·5 fast particles fall, from all directions, on 1 sq. cm. per second. Roughly consistent with these figures are the results found with cloud chambers. Skobelzyn has obtained as many as one track every ten expansions, but in the work of Anderson the number of tracks which were long enough to be suitable for energy measurements was only about 1 in 50 photographs. By our method, tracks are found on 80 per cent, of the photographs. We intend to give a full account of the technique of this method of photography in a separate paper, confining ourselves here to a rough outline only. A cloud chamber of diameter 13 cm. and depth 3 cm. is arranged with its plane vertical and two Geiger-Müller counters, each 10 cm. by 2 cm. are placed one above and one below the chamber so that any ray which passes straight through both counters will also pass through the illuminated part of the chamber, fig 2. An alternative arrangement is described on p. 719. The counters are connected to a valve circuit arranged to record only simultaneous discharges of the two counters.