Bubble Chambers for Experiments in Nuclear Astrophysics

Abstract

A bubble chamber has been developed to be used as an active target system for low energy nuclear astrophysics experiments. Adopting ideas from dark matter detection with superheated liquids, a detector system compatible with gamma-ray beams has been developed. This detector alleviates some of the limitations encountered in standard measurements of the minute cross sections of interest to stellar environments. While the astrophysically relevant nuclear reaction processes at hydrostatic burning temperatures are dominated by radiative captures, in this experimental scheme we measure the time-reversed processes. Such photodisintegrations allow us to compute the radiative capture cross sections when transitions to excited states of the reaction products are negligible. Due to the transformation of phase space, the photodisintegration cross sections are up to two orders of magnitude higher. The main advantage of the new target-detector system is a density several orders of magnitude higher than conventional gas targets. Also, the detector is virtually insensitive to the gamma-ray beam itself, thus allowing us to detect only the products of the nuclear reaction of interest. The development and the operation as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the bubble chamber are discussed.

Accepted manuscript in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A. 12 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Discrimination of nuclear recoils from alpha particles with superheated liquids
• New Insights into Particle Detection with Superheated Liquids
• First determination of an astrophysical cross section with a bubble chamber: the 15N(α,γ)19F reaction

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• On the critical energy required for homogeneous nucleation in bubble chambers employed in dark matter searches
• Measuring the cross section of the ${}^{15}$N($\alpha$,$\gamma$)${}^{19}$F reaction using a single-fluid bubble chamber
• A New Approach to Determine Radiative Capture Reaction Rates at Astrophysical Energies