Vena Carter, "Advanced Nuclear Physics"Global Media | 2009 | ISBN: 9380168926 | 104 pages | File type: PDF | 1 mb
Introduction Nuclear physics
Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies the building blocks and interactions of atomic nuclei.
The most commonly known applications of nuclear physics are nuclear power and nuclear weapons, but the research field is also the basis for a far wider range of applications, including in the medical sector (nuclear medicine, magnetic resonanceimaging), in materials engineering (ion implantation) and in archaeology (radiocarbon dating).
The field of particle physics evolved out of nuclear physics and, for this reason, has been included under the same term in earlier times.
History
The discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson was the first indication that the atom had internal structure. At the turn of the 20th century the accepted model of the atom was J. J. Thomson's "plum pudding" model in which the atom was a large positively charged ball with small negatively charged electrons embedde d ins ide of it. By the turn of the century physicists had also discovered three types of radiation coming from atoms, which they named alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. Experiments in 1911 by Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn, and by James Chadwick in 1914 discovered that the beta decay spectrum was continuous rather than discrete. That is, electrons were ejected from the atom with a range of energies, rather than the discrete amounts of energies that were observed in gamma and alpha decays. This was a problem for nuclear physics at the time, because it indicated that energy was not conserved in these decays.
In 1905, Albert Einstein formulated the idea of mass–energy equivalence. While the work on radioactivity by Becquerel, Pierre and Marie Curie predates this, an explanation of the source of the energy of radioactivity would have to wait for the discovery that the nucleus itself was composed of smaller constituents, the nucleons.
Rutherford's team discovers the nucleus In 1907 Ernest Rutherford published "Radiation of the α Particle from Radium in passing through Matter". Geiger expanded on this work in a communication to the Royal Society with experiments he and Rutherford had done passing α particles through air, aluminum foil and gold leaf. More work was published in 1909 by Geiger and Marsden and further greatly expanded work was published in 1910 by Geiger, In 1911-2 Rutherford went before the Royal Soc iety to e xplain the experiments and p ropo und the new theory of the atomic nucleus as we now understand it.
