Wednesday April 15, 2015

We will meet in TL 2221 on Wednesday April 15 at 3:30 pm EST.

For those calling in we'll use the Blue Jeans [1] audio conference system.

Phone number: 1-888-240-2560
Meeting ID: 3528502673#
Meeting URL: http://bluejeans.com/3528502673

Agenda:

1- Bubble Chamber progress at Argonne

media:bubble_photo_April2015_1.jpg

media:bubble_photo_April2015_2.jpg

media:Hg_N2O_1.gif

media:Hg_N2O_2.gif

media:Hg_N2O_3.gif

media:Hg_N2O_4.gif

media:Hg_N2O_5.gif

media:Hg_N2O_6.gif

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Notes from this meeting:

• Bubble Chamber:

1. The bubble chamber is operational. The above movies show a 50 ms (5 frames) of bubble formation and quenching.
2. The operational temperature is -10C and at 20 atm. To quench the bubble, the pressure is raised to 100 atm.
3. Initial background and neutron source tests indicate that the chamber is working as expected. The cosmic background rate is about 1 bubble every two minutes.
4. The only remaining issue is the mercury droplets at the inner wall of the glass cell. These droplets got stuck there when the chamber was being filled with N₂O. Mercury is not supposed to behave this way but it did.
5. Since mercury has a low threshold for (g,n) reactions (6.0 and 6.2 MeV), we must get rid of this possible source of background.
6. Few possible ideas to get rid of mercury:
   1. New coating for the inner wall of the glass cell.