Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies atomic nuclei and their constituents and interactions,

in addition to the study of other forms of nuclear matter.

Nuclear physics should not be confused with atomic physics, which studies the atom as a whole,
including its electrons.

Discoveries in nuclear physics have led to applications in many fields. This includes nuclear power,
nuclear weapons, nuclear medicine and magnetic resonance imaging, industrial and agricultural
isotopes, ion implantation in materials engineering, and radiocarbon dating in geology and archaeology.
Such applications are studied in the field of nuclear engineering.

Particle physics evolved out of nuclear physics and the two fields are typically taught in close association.
Nuclear astrophysics, the application of nuclear physics to astrophysics, is crucial in explaining the inner
workings of stars and the origin of the chemical elements.

History

Henri Becquerel

Since the 1920s, cloud chambers played an important role of particle detectors and eventually lead to
the discovery of positron, muon and kaon.

The history of nuclear physics as a discipline distinct from atomic physics, starts with the discovery of
radioactivity by Henri Becquerel in 1896,[1] made while investigating phosphorescence in uranium salts.
[2] The discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson[3] a year later was an indication that the atom had
internal structure. At the beginning of the 20th century the accepted model of the atom was J. J.
Thomson's "plum pudding" model in which the atom was a positively charged ball with smaller
negatively charged electrons embedded inside it.

In the years that followed, radioactivity was extensively investigated, notably by Marie Curie, a Polish
physicist whose maiden name was Sklodkowska, Pierre Curie, Ernest Rutherford and others. By the turn
of the century, physicists had also discovered three types of radiation emanating from atoms, which they
named alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. Experiments by Otto Hahn in 1911 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 continuous range of energies, rather than the discrete amounts of
energy that were observed in gamma and alpha decays. This was a problem for nuclear physics at the
time, because it seemed to indicate that energy was not conserved in these decays.

The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Becquerel, for his discovery and to Marie and
Pierre Curie for their subsequent research into radioactivity. Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry in 1908 for his "investigations into the disintegration of the elements and the chemistry of
radioactive substances".

In 1905, Albert Einstein formulated the idea of mass–energy equivalence. While the work on
radioactivity by Becquerel 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 discovers the nucleus

In 1906, Ernest Rutherford published "Retardation of the α Particle from Radium in passing through
matter."[4] Hans Geiger expanded on this work in a communication to the Royal Society[5] with
experiments he and Rutherford had done, passing alpha particles through air, aluminum foil and gold
leaf. More work was published in 1909 by Geiger and Ernest Marsden,[6] and further greatly expanded
work was published in 1910 by Geiger.[7] In 1911–1912 Rutherford went before the Royal Society to
explain the experiments and propound the new theory of the atomic nucleus as we now understand it.

Published in 1909,[8] with the eventual classical analysis by Rutherford published May 1911,[9][10][11]
[12] the key preemptive experiment was performed during 1909,[9][13][14][15] at the University of
Manchester. Ernest Rutherford's assistant, Professor [15] Johannes [14] "Hans" Geiger, and an
undergraduate, Marsden,[15] performed an experiment in which Geiger and Marsden under
Rutherford's supervision fired alpha particles (helium 4 nuclei[16]) at a thin film of gold foil. The plum
pudding model had predicted that the alpha particles should come out of the foil with their trajectories
being at most slightly bent. But Rutherford instructed his team to look for something that shocked him
to observe: a few particles were scattered through large angles, even completely backwards in some
cases. He likened it to firing a bullet at tissue paper and having it bounce off. The discovery, with
Rutherford's analysis of the data in 1911, led to the Rutherford model of the atom, in which the atom
had a very small, very dense nucleus containing most of its mass, and consisting of heavy positively
charged particles with embedded electrons in order to balance out the charge (since the neutron was
unknown). As an example, in this model (which is not the modern one) nitrogen-14 consisted of a
nucleus with 14 protons and 7 electrons (21 total particles) and the nucleus was surrounded by 7 more
orbiting electrons.

Eddington and stellar nuclear fusion

Around 1920, Arthur Eddington anticipated the discovery and mechanism of nuclear fusion processes in
stars, in his paper The Internal Constitution of the Stars.[17][18] At that time, the source of stellar energy
was a complete mystery; Eddington correctly speculated that the source was fusion of hydrogen into
helium, liberating enormous energy according to Einstein's equation E = mc2. This was a particularly
remarkable development since at that time fusion and thermonuclear energy, and even that stars are
largely composed of hydrogen (see metallicity), had not yet been discovered.

Studies of nuclear spin

The Rutherford model worked quite well until studies of nuclear spin were carried out by Franco Rasetti
at the California Institute of Technology in 1929. By 1925 it was known that protons[citation needed] and
electrons each had a spin of ±+1⁄2. In the Rutherford model of nitrogen-14, 20 of the total 21 nuclear
particles should have paired up to cancel each other's spin, and the final odd particle should have left
the nucleus with a net spin of 1⁄2. Rasetti discovered, however, that nitrogen-14 had a spin of 1.

James Chadwick discovers the neutron

Main article: Discovery of the neutron

In 1932 Chadwick realized that radiation that had been observed by Walther Bothe, Herbert Becker,
Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie was actually due to a neutral particle of about the same mass as the
proton, that he called the neutron (following a suggestion from Rutherford about the need for such a
particle).[19] In the same year Dmitri Ivanenko suggested that there were no electrons in the nucleus —
only protons and neutrons — and that neutrons were spin 1⁄2 particles, which explained the mass not due
to protons. The neutron spin immediately solved the problem of the spin of nitrogen-14, as the one
unpaired proton and one unpaired neutron in this model each contributed a spin of 1⁄2 in the same
direction, giving a final total spin of 1.

With the discovery of the neutron, scientists could at last calculate what fraction of binding energy each
nucleus had, by comparing the nuclear mass with that of the protons and neutrons which composed it.
Differences between nuclear masses were calculated in this way. When nuclear reactions were
measured, these were found to agree with Einstein's calculation of the equivalence of mass and energy
to within 1% as of 1934.