Joe (Naperville North H.S.)
Mentor: Andrew Sonnenschein
This summer I helped to develop a stereoscopic 3D camera system for the Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics (COUPP) dark matter bubble chamber. This camera system helped us to increase the sensitivity of the chamber by excluding data from the relatively noisy chamber walls. In order to do this we mounted and determined the location of the optical center of the camera by using two known targets a fixed distance apart and then removing all parallax shift when the camera system was rotated. Next we rotated the camera along the plane of the sensor to determine all lens aberrations. Finally, after mounting the camera to the chamber we used a feature identification system to align the inner reaction vessel with the optical axis of the camera. This allowed us to create reliable 3D recreations of events and increase the overall signal to noise ratio of the chamber.