Effects of liquid helium bubble formation in a superconducting cavity cryogenic system

We constructed a simple prototype model based on the geometry of the 56 MHz superconducting cavity for RHIC. We studied the formation, in this prototype, of bubbles of liquid helium and their thermal effects on the cavity. We found that due to the low viscosity of the liquid helium, and its small surface tension, no large bubbles formed. The tiny bubbles, generated from most of the area, behaved like light gas travelling in a free space and escaped from the trapping region. The bubbles that were generated in the trapping area, due to its descending geometry, are much bigger than the other bubbles, but due to the liquid flow generated by heating, they still are negligible compared to the size of the trapping region. We expected that the effects of bubbles in our 56 MHz cavity during operation might well be negligible.