Cloud chamber
Cámara de niebla
- Date
- 1911 · confidence high
- Place
- Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
- Credited to
- Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (Cavendish Laboratory)
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What it is
Inspired by clouds he had observed atop Ben Nevis, Wilson perfected an expansion chamber that makes the tracks of charged particles visible by condensing water droplets on the ions they leave behind.
Wilson shared the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics for this invention.
What it led to
- First direct observations of subatomic particle tracks
- Later discoveries of the positron and the muon