From the archives: early physics research at Imperial and at CERN

Dr Colin West (Bsc Physics 1960, PhD 1965) shares his memories of his research at CERN in the early 1960's.

Dr West attended the alumni trip to Geneva over the weekend of 10 – 12 October 2014. He had an extra special reason for wanting to attend – to the best of his knowledge he was the very first Imperial student to work at CERN.

"I was involved in an early particle physics project at Imperial in which we constructed a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber.  The size of it meant that there was no room in the Physics Department, so it was housed in a large tent behind the building on Prince Consort Road [pictured below] and remained there when the new Blackett Laboratory was opened in October 1960.

In 1961, the bubble chamber was moved to the French Nuclear Research Centre at Saclay, near Paris, for testing. In the image [above] you can see where the bubble chamber was being loaded into an ex-Army vehicle. You can see on the left two members of the group with folded arms, just behind the large wheels.   In the foreground is Ian Butterworth, later department head, and behind him Norman Barford, who led the project.

In France, it was found that the steel of flanges that held the thick glass windows in place underwent a phase transition when the bubble chamber was cooled down, resulting in a loss of the stress needed to keep the windows sealed and a leakage of hydrogen into the surrounding vacuum.  There was no feasible solution to this problem and the project was therefore terminated.

The students working on it were reassigned and I went to CERN to work initially on the CERN/ETH cloud chamber experiment [pictured below] on neutral K-meson decays. This was with my PhD supervisor Peter Astbury. The cloud chamber experiment was measuring the branching ratios of K₀₂ decays.

When this was finished, the cloud chamber was replaced by spark chambers and it was used to study a series of K meson scattering experiments. I read somewhere that the glass cloud chamber was subsequently used as an aquarium in CERN - I went looking around the restaurant area to see if I could find it, but I couldn’t!”

Read about the alumni trip to CERN, or find out what alumni thought of the day