The Rutherford Scattering Experiment Physics （卢瑟福散射实验物理）.pdf

The Rutherford Scattering Experiment Tony Tyson April 22, 2013 1 Introduction The foundations of modern ideas about atomic structure are considered to have been laid by Sir Ernest Rutherford in 1911, with his postulates concerning the scattering of alpha particles by atoms. Two of his students, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden (an undergraduate), set out to measure the number of alpha particles scattered out of a collimated beam upon hitting a thin metal foil. They determined the angular distribution of the scattered particles for several different materials, thicknesses and alpha energies. To their initial surprise, Geiger and Marsden found that some alpha particles were scattered through large angles in atomic collisions. This large angle scattering of alpha particles could not be explained by existing theories. This data lead Rutherford to speculate on the structure of the atom and devise a new ”nuclear atom” model. His predictions concerning the characteristics of this nuclear atom were confirmed by the subsequent experiments of Geiger and Marsden with the scattering of alpha particles by thin gold and silver foils (Phil. Mag. 25. 605 (1913), Figure 1). Performance of similar experiments in an undergraduate laboratory is not only of historical interest, but serves to demonstrate how scattering experiments provide the physicist with a powerful investigative technique. The essential idea of Rutherford’s theory is to consider the -particle as a charged mass traveling according to the classical equations of motion in the Coulomb field of a nucleus. The dimensions of both the -particle and nucleus are assumed to be small compared to atomic dimensions ( of the atomic diameter). The nucleus was assumed to contain most of the atomic mass and a charge . On this picture the electrons w