A Rapid Cycling Hydrogen Bubble Chamber with High Spatial Resolution to Visualize Charm Decays

Abstract

In the Autumn of 1979, mass values and decay modes for D-mesons were already established from leptonic production with e⁺, e^--colliding beams. Emulsion exposures in neutrino beams indicated lifetimes between 10^-12 s and 10^-13 s, and neutrino beam dump experiments yielded indirect evidence for hadronic charm production with estimated cross sections from 10 µb to 50 µb; In striking contrast to leptonic charm production, hadronic interactions should produce associated charmed pairs and visual observation with a bubble chamber seemed to be the only clean method of separating these double decays from the strange particle background. In this talk we report on the contruction and operation of such a bubble chamber, named LEBC, which stands for LEXAN bubble chamber.