James W. Cronin

Electron Showers in a Lead Plate Spark Chamber

A spark chamber, containing 40 Pb plates of one‐third radiation length each, has been exposed to electron beams of energy 85 to 750 MeV. The total number of sparks in the showers and their distribution is measured. For electron energies up to 200 MeV the results agree well with Wilsons Monte Carlo calculations. Above 200 MeV poor multiple track efficiency destroys the agreement. It is concluded that such a spark chamber is a good detector for electrons, and with further development could serve as a spectrometer.

Spark Chambers - State of the Art

A review of the present state of spark chamber technology is presented. The properties of spark chambers are reviewed and a summary of recent developments is given. An effort is made to make the survey of recent developments as complete as possible. Emphasis is given to technical problems which remain to be solved.

Design and performance of the Chicago Air Shower Array

Abstract The Chicago Air Shower Array is a large area surface array designed to significantly improve the flux sensitivity to ultra high energy gamma rays over that of existing detectors. We discuss the design and review the current status of this experiment.

Ionization Density Effects in Spark Chambers

During the course of an experiment on the decay properties of Λ° particles we observed qualitatively an ionization effect. The sparks of the heavily ionizing proton were bright and had 100% gap efficiency. The sparks of the minimum ionizing pion are weak and have a low gap efficiency. These observations are studied quantitatively in this paper.