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Control room of the Brookhaven 80-inch Liquid Hydrogen Bubble Chamber showing some of the many instruments and controls required to monitor and precisely regulate the operation of the large, complex components and systems. Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York. 1963
The bubble chamber is a vessel filled with superheated transparent liquid hydrogen used to detect high-energy charged particles moving through it. Particle accelerator facilities like the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) used bubble chambers extensively in the past, however they have now mostly been supplanted by wire chambers, spark chambers, drift chambers, and silicon detectors. The most significant discovery made with Brookhaven’s 80-inch chamber came in the first few months of its operation: the detection of the Ω⁻ particle, whose existence had been predicted by theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann. This finding supported the first attempt by physicists to organize the increasingly long list of subatomic particles into an orderly pattern, similar to that used to arrange elements in the periodic table.