CEA Will Give Up Bubble Chamber; Sees No Loss in Research Prestige

The Cambridge Electron Accelerations bubble chamber -- one of the largest in the world -- will no longer used here and may be shipped to Long Island, Chicago or Stanford.

But the CEA is convinced that its decision to abandon the chamber, made this week, will not damage the prestige physics research at Harvard and MIT.

M. Stanley Livingstone, CEA director, said Monday that bubble chambers where will be available to science and graduate students who were using the CEA's. But he emphasized many experiments are conducted shout the bubble chambers -- and the new ways of using the accelerator about it are now being studied. "We will be doing work as important as our search with the bubble chamber, and may be making some breakthroughs," he said.

The chamber was severely damaged in an explosion at the CEA experimental hall July 5 while it was being filled with liquid hydrogen for the first time. It is now being rebuilt in a converted warehouse in Billerica, 25 miles north of Boston. Since hydrogen from the chamber is believed to have triggered the explosion, CEA staff members decided two weeks ago that it would have to be housed in a separate building -- where an accident could be easily controlled -- or not be used at all.

Other Chambers

"We now find it would take two-and-a-half years to get funds for a new building and complete it," Livingstone explained. "By that time the construction of other bubble chambers would have made ours less useful."

When the bubble chamber is reassembled, it may be offered to either Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, Long Island, the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago or the Stanford Linear Accelerator, all of which could house it safely, Livingstone said.

Research at the CEA, scheduled to resume Nov. 1, must now wait until mid-January because of delays in repairing the experimental hall. Richard Wilson, professor of Physics, said Tuesday that the explosion has caused most problems for the 19 graduate students working there. "Professors get used to delays, but graduate students want their work over with," he said. They've all been set back a year and those who had started with the bubble chamber are stuck with using chambers elsewhere."

By next July, the CEA will also reactivate a small bubble chamber it used in the early part of 1964, Livingstone said. It holds 32 quarts of liquid hydrogen when full -- only 1/20 the capacity of the larger chamber -- and will permit the continuation of a few bubble chamber experiments.