Already two weeks ago a new "toy" arrived in my institute. It was the first time that I was seeing a working cloud chamber and I spent most of the afternoon looking for the different tracks, trying to guess the origin, wondering how much radioactive material there is around my office :)
I then thought that it would have been nice to start a new current in this blog talking about the main detectors that we use nowadays in particle physics....and what can be better then the cloud chamber to start this list?
Cloud chambers played a prominent role in experimental particle physics from 1920s to the 1950s, until the advent of the bubble chamber. In particular, the discoveries of the positron in 1932 (acknowledged by a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1936) and the kaon in 1953 were made using cloud chambers as detectors.
