Talk Like A Physicist

Tuesday Physics Tattoos: CERN bubble chamber tracks tattoos:

Bubble chamber tracks are so beautiful and having a tattoo of the actual tracks is very special.

Considering that LHC will start tonight, there was an interesting comment about this tattoo:

You have a potential end of the effing universe tattooed on your arm. Well done, sir.

For additional pictures of this tattoo, please see Lofidelity’s Flickr

Here is another tattoo of the same bubble chamber track image.

The original track image looks like this:

Here, the particles in the beam, which comes in from the left, are pions, the short-lived particles discovered originally in cosmic rays. One has interacted with a proton in the liquid near the upper left, to create a spray of new particles. One of these was a neutral (uncharged) particle, which left no track, but revealed its existence when it decayed nearer the centre of the image, to produce two charged particles that leave behind a sideways V shape.

The chamber was located in a magnetic field, which made positive particles curve to the right, and negative particles to the left. Particles with high energies, including the beam particles, curve almost imperceptibly, but particles with lower energies produce fascinating spirals. These are mainly due to electrons knocked from atoms in the liquid hydrogen.