Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword by Leon M. Lederman
- Editors' acknowledgments
- Photographs of the symposium
- List of abbreviations
- List of notation
- I Introduction
- II Particle discoveries in cosmic rays
- 4 Cosmic-ray cloud-chamber contributions to the discovery of the strange particles in the decade 1947–1957
- 5 Cosmic-ray work with emulsions in the 1940s and 1950s
- III High-energy nuclear physics
- IV The new laboratory
- V The strange particles
- VI Weak interactions
- VII Weak interactions and parity nonconservation
- VIII The particle physics community
- IX Theories of hadrons
- X Personal overviews
- Name index
- Subject index
5 - Cosmic-ray work with emulsions in the 1940s and 1950s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword by Leon M. Lederman
- Editors' acknowledgments
- Photographs of the symposium
- List of abbreviations
- List of notation
- I Introduction
- II Particle discoveries in cosmic rays
- 4 Cosmic-ray cloud-chamber contributions to the discovery of the strange particles in the decade 1947–1957
- 5 Cosmic-ray work with emulsions in the 1940s and 1950s
- III High-energy nuclear physics
- IV The new laboratory
- V The strange particles
- VI Weak interactions
- VII Weak interactions and parity nonconservation
- VIII The particle physics community
- IX Theories of hadrons
- X Personal overviews
- Name index
- Subject index
Summary
The photographic method
The use of photographic plates to record ionizing radiations dates back to Henri Becquerel, who in 1896 discovered radioactivity from the blackening of plates by uranium salts. In 1910–11, M. Kinoshita showed that it was possible to record individual tracks due to a particles at both verticle and tangential angles to the emulsion plane. During the 1920s and 1930s, experiments by M. Blau and H. Wambacher in Germany, G. Zhdanov in the USSR, H. J. Taylor in England, and R. Wilkins and H. Rumbaugh and A. Locher in the United States recorded particles both from cosmic rays and from accelerators, on occasion achieving sensitivity to protons by use of organic sensitizing dyes (e.g., pinakryptol yellow). The general nonreproducibility of the results, however, placed the technique under something of a cloud. Indeed, in 1935, Taylor, at Cambridge, using Ilford Rl and R2 emulsions, concluded that it was “impossible to deduce with any accuracy the energy of individual particles from range in emulsion.” Similar remarks were voiced by M. Stanley Livingston and Hans Bethe in 1937.
This situation was transformed for two reasons. First, Cecil F. Powell and F. Fertel in 1943 showed that the energy resolution in the study of (d, p) reactions in boron, using the proton range in emulsion, was at least as good as that obtained with counters and absorbers (Figure 5.1); the method could be made quantitative.
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- Pions to QuarksParticle Physics in the 1950s, pp. 89 - 108Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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