Marsden, Ernst

He returned to England in 1908, and it was there, at Manchester University, that he and his coworkers Hans Geiger and Ernst Marsden performed the famous gold foil experiments that led to the nuclear model of the atom. Not only did he perform much important research in physics and chemistry, but he also guided the work of ten future recipients of the Nobel Prize. 

The structure of the atom was revealed in 1911 as a result of Ernst Rutherford s interpretation of the 1909 Geiger-Marsden experiment (Rutherford 1911). 

The apparatus used for these studies is pictured in Figure 2-11. Alpha particles were detected by the flashes of light they product when they struck a zinc sulfide screen mounted on the end of a telescope. When Geiger and Ernst Marsden, a student, bombarded very thin foils of gold with a particles, they observed the following ... 

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