So I was trying to make a simple cloud chamber with some old parts and a bit of dry ice, and I swear I saw a track that didn’t look like the usual wispy streaks at all—it was more like a faint, thick dash that just stopped. I’ve been staring at it for an hour now wondering if my insulation foam is just shedding weird bits or if I actually saw something decay right in front of me.
That dash you saw in the cloud chamber sounds odd for a normal ion trail. Usually the vapor is wispy, not a solid stroke that ends suddenly.
Could be a speck of dust or a bit of insulation foam shedding into the vapor and catching the light in a strange way.
I once chased a straight line that turned out to be a scratch on the lid rather than a real particle path in a cloud chamber.
A fast particle might make a sharp dash but those tracks often twist or widen as it loses energy so a clean stop would be unusual.
I get the itch to overinterpret every frame but maybe its just a momentary density in the vapor or a lighting quirk.
If you are hoping for a decay signal in a DIY cloud chamber you are asking a lot of your setup and the simplest answer is stray material and noise.
What if the framing itself is the problem when we expect a sudden dash rather than a story that fades away slowly?