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A cloud chamber, also known as a Wilson chamber, is a particle detector used for visualizing the passage of ionizing radiation. A cloud chamber consists of a sealed environment containing a supersaturated vapor of water or alcohol .
The ionization chamber is the simplest type of gaseous ionisation detector, and is widely used for the detection and measurement of many types of ionizing radiation, including X-rays, gamma rays, alpha particles and beta particles.
Ionizing radiation is used in a wide variety of fields such as medicine, nuclear power, research, and industrial manufacturing, but is a health hazard if proper measures against excessive exposure are not taken. Exposure to ionizing radiation causes cell damage to living tissue and organ damage.
Some kinds of ionizing radiation can be detected in a cloud chamber. Radiation with sufficiently high energy can ionize atoms; that is to say it can knock electrons off atoms, creating ions. Ionization occurs when an electron is stripped (or "knocked out") from an electron shell of the atom, which leaves the atom with a net positive charge.
Collectively, these electrons are defined as delta radiation when they have sufficient energy to ionize further atoms through subsequent interactions on their own. Delta rays appear as branches in the main track of a cloud chamber (See Figs. 1,2). These branches will appear nearer the start of the track of a heavy charged particle, where more ...
The original cloud chamber of C.T.R. Wilson Wilson's Cloud Chamber at AEC's Brookhaven National Laboratory. For the invention of the cloud chamber he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927. [7] [5] He shared this prize with the American physicist Arthur Compton, rewarded for his work on the particle nature of radiation. [19]
Because of this high mass and strong absorption, if alpha-emitting radionuclides do enter the body (upon being inhaled, ingested, or injected, as with the use of Thorotrast for high-quality X-ray images prior to the 1950s), alpha radiation is the most destructive form of ionizing radiation. It is the most strongly ionizing, and with large ...
Diffusion cloud chamber with tracks of ionizing radiation (alpha particles) that are made visible as strings of droplets. In dosimetry, linear energy transfer (LET) is the amount of energy that an ionizing particle transfers to the material traversed per unit distance. It describes the action of radiation into matter.