Madeline ( Lyons Township H.S.)
Mentor: Mike Crisler
Bubble chambers are contraptions used for direct dark matter detection. They contain a superheated fluid, and should form a small bubble if a dark matter particle interacts with a nucleus of an atom of the fluid. It's essential to know the internal temperature of bubble chambers in order to know the energy threshold, or the energy needed to form one of these bubbles. However, temperature probes cannot be inserted into the chambers because the probes provide nucleation sites, and extraneous bubbles consequently form. This summer, I worked on developing a technique to infer the temperature of a fluid by measuring where the peak resonance frequencies of a three-dimensional standing wave are, and how specific peak frequencies change with temperature.