Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, was a Scottish physicist and meteorologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the cloud chamber.
Wilson in 1927
Commemorative plaque at Ben Nevis about the observatory there, and C.T.R. Wilson's cloud chamber
The original cloud chamber of C.T.R. Wilson
Wilson's Cloud Chamber at AEC's Brookhaven National Laboratory
A cloud chamber, also known as a Wilson cloud chamber, is a particle detector used for visualizing the passage of ionizing radiation.
Fig. 2: The original cloud chamber of C.T.R. Wilson at the Cavendish Lab, Cambridge England.
Fig. 4: How condensation trails are formed in a diffusion cloud chamber.
Fig. 5: In a diffusion cloud chamber, a 5.3 MeV alpha-particle track from a Pb-210 pin source near Point (1) undergoes Rutherford scattering near Point (2), deflecting by angle theta of about 30 degrees. It scatters once again near Point (3), and finally comes to rest in the gas. The target nucleus in the chamber gas could have been a nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, or hydrogen nucleus. It received enough kinetic energy in the elastic collision to cause a short visible recoiling track near Point (2). (The scale is in centimeters.)
Example of watercooled thermoelectric cloud chamber
