Abstract
This chapter illustrates the path which led to the discovery that particles of extremely high energy, up to a few joule, come from extraterrestrial sources and collide with Earth’s atmosphere. The history of this discovery started in the beginning of the twentieth century, but many of the techniques then introduced are still in use. A relevant part of the progress happened in recent years and has a large impact on the physics of elementary particles and fundamental interactions.
This chapter illustrates the path which led to the discovery that particles of extremely high energy, up to a few joule, come from extraterrestrial sources and collide with Earth’s atmosphere. The history of this discovery started in the beginning of the twentieth century, but many of the techniques then introduced are still in use. A relevant part of the progress happened in recent years and has a large impact on the physics of elementary particles and fundamental interactions.
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Notes
- 1.
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, (1869–1959), a Scottish physicist and meteorologist, received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the cloud chamber; see the next chapter.
- 2.
Hess was born in 1883 in Steiermark, Austria, and graduated from Graz University in 1906 where he became professor of Experimental Physics in 1919. In 1936 Hess was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of cosmic rays. He moved to the USA in 1938 as a professor at Fordham University. Hess became an American citizen in 1944 and lived in New York until his death in 1964.
- 3.
Robert A. Millikan (Morrison 1868—Pasadena 1953) was an American experimental physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923 for his measurements of the electron charge and his work on the photoelectric effect. A scholar of classical literature before turning to physics, he was president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1921 to 1945. He was not famous for his deontology: a common saying at Caltech was “Jesus saves, and Millikan takes the credit.”
- 4.
The Geiger–Müller counter is a cylinder filled with a gas, with a charged metal wire inside. When a charged particle enters the detector, it ionizes the gas, and the ions and the electrons can be collected by the wire and by the walls. The electrical signal of the wire can be amplified and read by means of an amperometer. The tension V of the wire is large (a few thousand volts), in such a way that the gas is completely ionized; the signal is then a short pulse of height independent of the energy of the particle. Geiger–Müller tubes can be also appropriate for detecting \(\gamma \) radiation, since a photoelectron or a Compton-scattered electron can generate an avalanche.
- 5.
Oskar Klein (1894–1977) was a Swedish theoretical physicist; Walter Gordon (1893–1939) was a German theoretical physicist, former student of Max Planck.
- 6.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (Bristol, UK, 1902—Tallahassee, US, 1984) was one of the founders of quantum physics. After graduating in engineering and later studying physics, he became professor of mathematics in Cambridge. In 1933 he shared the Nobel Prize with Schrödinger. He assigned to the concept of “beauty in mathematics” a prominent role among the basic aspects intrinsic to the nature so far as to argue that “a mathematically beautiful theory is more likely to be right than an ugly one that fits some experimental data.”
- 7.
The term spinor indicates in general a vector which has definite transformation properties for a rotation in the proper angular momentum space—the spin space. The properties of rotation in spin space will be described in greater detail in Chap. 5.
- 8.
The cloud chamber (see also next chapter), invented by C.T.R. Wilson at the beginning of the twentieth century, was an instrument for reconstructing the trajectories of charged particles. The instrument is a container with a glass window, filled with air and saturated water vapor; the volume could be suddenly expanded, bringing the vapor to a supersaturated (metastable) state. A charged cosmic ray crossing the chamber produces ions, which act as seeds for the generation of droplets along the trajectory. One can record the trajectory by taking a photographic picture. If the chamber is immersed in a magnetic field, momentum and charge can be measured by the curvature. The working principle of bubble chambers is similar to that of the cloud chamber, but here the fluid is a liquid. Along the tracks’ trajectories, a trail of gas bubbles condensates around the ions. Bubble and cloud chambers provide a complete information: the measurement of the bubble density and the range, i.e., the total track length before the particle eventually stops, provide an estimate for the energy and the mass; the angles of scattering provide an estimate for the momentum.
- 9.
Bruno Rossi (Venice 1905—Cambridge, MA, 1993) graduated from Bologna and then moved to Arcetri near Florence before becoming full professor of physics at the University of Padua in 1932. In Padua he was charged of overseeing the design and construction of the new Physics Institute, which was inaugurated in 1937. He was exiled in 1938, as a consequence of the Italian racial laws, and he moved to Chicago and then to Cornell. In 1943 he joined the Manhattan project in Los Alamos, working at the development of the atomic bomb, and after the end of the Second World War moved to MIT. At MIT Rossi started working on space missions as a scientific consultant for the newborn NASA, and proposed together with his former student Riccardo Giacconi, physics Nobel prize in 2002, the rocket experiment that discovered the first extra-solar source of X-rays. Many fundamental contributions to modern physics, for example the electronic coincidence circuit, the discovery and study of extensive air showers, the East–West effect, and the use of satellites for the exploration of the high-energy Universe, are due to Bruno Rossi.
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De Angelis, A., Pimenta, M. (2018). Cosmic Rays and the Development of Particle Physics. In: Introduction to Particle and Astroparticle Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78181-5_3
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