Rutherford measurement

R. Aveyard, B. P. Binks, P. D. I. Fletcher, and C. E. Rutherford, Measurement of contact angles of spherical monodisperse particles with surfactant solutions, Colloids Surf. A 83, 89-98 (1994). 

Rutherford backscattering spectrometry is the measurement of the energies of ions scattered back from the surface and the outer microns (1 micron = 1 pm) of a sample. Typically, helium ions with energies around 2 MeV are used and the sample is a metal coated silicon wafer that has been ion implanted with about a... 

By inserting a semiconductor x-ray detector into the analysis chamber, one can measure particle induced x-rays. The cross section for particle induced x-ray emission (PIXE) is much greater than that for Rutherford backscattering and PIXE is a fast and convenient method for measuring the identity of atomic species within... 

In 1903, Rutherford and associates were finally able to deflect the a-rays by electric and magnetic fields, showing that these are positively charged. Measurement of the charge-to-mass ratio indicated that a-rays were of atomic dimensions. In 1908 definitive experiments showed a-rays to be doubly chaiged helium atoms, ie, helium nuclei. 

These samples were measured non-destructively by energy-dispersive XRF with synclirotron radiation excitation (SYXRS), by g-XRF, by wavelength-dispersive XRF (WDXRS), and by Rutherford back scattering (RBS), by X-ray reflectometry (XRR) and by destructive secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) as well (both last methods were used for independant comparison). 

The absolute precision of ERS therefore depends on that of da/dfl (Ej, (t>). Unfortunately, some disagreement prevails among measurements of the recoil cross section. One recent determination is shown in Figure 4a for (t> = 30° and 25°. The convergence of these data with the Rutherford cross section near 1 MeV lends support to their validity. The solid lines are least squares fits to the polynomial form used by Tirira et al.. For (t> = 30°, the expression reads ... 

The measured cross section data for are shown in Figure 4b. The dominant resonance at 2.13 MeV offers a powerful enhancement to sensitivity for deuterium detection, exceedii the Rutherford cross section by two orders of magnitude. 

Rutherford found that a second type of radiation was attracted to the positively charged electrode. He proposed that this type of radiation consists of a stream of negatively charged particles. By measuring the charge and mass of these particles, he showed that they are electrons. The rapidly moving electrons emitted by nuclei are called (3 particles and denoted (3". Because a (3 particle has no protons or neutrons, its mass number is 0 and it can be written Je. 

The first person to identify the hydrogen ion as a component of all atoms was Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford had his hand in virtually every aspect of atomic research. By 1919, he had discovered alpha and beta rays, found a new element (radon), won a Nobel Prize for his work with radioactive elements, and demonstrated that atoms had nuclei. For good measure, in 1914, he was knighted. However, still more discoveries and honors awaited him. 

Rutherford s discovery of the proton did not radically change the picture of the atom, but it did present a problem. The atom was still thought to be made up of a heavy, positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons. The difference was that scientists now knew that the nucleus was composed of protons. Measurements showed that the electrical charge of a proton was identical to, but opposite of, the charge on an electron. The proton s charge was positive, the electron s negative. Because atoms are electrically neutral, the number of protons in the nucleus had to equal the number of electrons. And that was the problem. 

The use of nuclear techniques allows the determination of C, N, H, O, and heavier contaminants relative fractions with great accuracy, and of the elements depth profile with moderate resolution (typically 10 nm). Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy (RBS) of light ions (like alpha particles) is used for the determination of carbon and heavier elements. Hydrogen contents are measured by forward scattering of protons by incident alpha particles (ERDA) elastic recoil detection analysis [44,47]. 

Decay of the nuclide itself. The conceptually simplest approach is to take a known quantity of the nuclide of interest, P, and repeatedly measure it over a sufficiently long period. The observed decrease in activity with time provides the half-life to an acceptable precision and it was this technique that was originally used to establish the concept of half-lives (Rutherford 1900). Most early attempts to assess half lives, such as that for " Th depicted on the front cover of this volume, followed this method (Rutherford and Soddy 1903). This approach may use measurement of either the activity of P, or the number of atoms of P, although the former is more commonly used. Care must be taken that the nuclide is sufficiently pure so that, for instance, no parent of P is admixed allowing continued production of P during the experiment. The technique is obviously limited to those nuclides with sufficiently short half-lives that decay can readily be measured in a realistic timeframe. In practice, the longest-lived isotopes which can be assessed in this way have half-lives of a few decades (e.g., °Pb Merritt et al. 1957). 

The discovery of two new elements started a frenetic race to find more. Actinium was soon unearthed (Debierne 1900) and many other substances were isolated from U and Th which also seemed to be new elements. One of these was discovered somewhat fortuitously. Several workers had noticed that the radioactivity of Th salts seemed to vary randomly with time and they noticed that the variation correlated with drafts in the lab, appearing to reflect a radioactive emanation which could be blown away from the surface of the Th. This Th-emanation was not attracted by charge and appeared to be a gas, °Rn, as it turns out, although Rutherford at first speculated that it was Th vapor. Rutherford swept some of the Th-emanation into a jar and repeatedly measured its ability to ionize air in order to assess its radioactivity. He was therefore the first to report an exponential decrease in radioactivity with time, and his 1900 paper on the subject introduced the familiar equation dN/dt = - iN, as well as the concept of half-lives (Rutherford 1900a). His measured half-life for the Th emanation of 60 seconds was remarkably close to our present assessment of 55.6 seconds for °Rn. 

By painstaking chemical separations, and careful study of the style and longevity of radioactivity from the resulting separates, these series were rapidly added to and only a year later more than 15 discrete radioactive substances were known, each with measured half-lives, and all arranged into four decay series from U, Th, Ac, and Ra (Rutherford 1904). 

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