The cathode ray tube

In 1897, Joseph Thomson demonstrated the existence of tiny particles much smaller in mass than
hydrogen, the lightest atom. Thomson had discovered the first subatomic particle, the electron

In the late 19th century, physicist J.J. Thomson began experimenting with cathode ray tubes. Cathode ray
tubes are sealed glass tubes from which most of the air has been evacuated. A high voltage is applied
across two electrodes at one end of the tube, which causes a beam of particles to flow from the cathode
(the negatively charged electrode) to the anode (the positively charged electrode). The tubes are called
cathode ray tubes because the particle beam or "cathode ray" originates at the cathode. The ray can be
detected by painting a material known as phosphors onto the far end of the tube beyond the anode. The
phosphors spark, or emit light, when impacted by the cathode ray.

To test the properties of the particles, Thomson placed two oppositely charged electric plates around the
cathode ray. The cathode ray was deflected away from the negatively charged electric plate and towards
the positively charged plate. This indicated that the cathode ray was composed of negatively-charged
particles.

The mass of each particle was much, much smaller than that of any known atom. Thomson repeated his
experiments using different metals as electrode materials, and found that the properties of the cathode
ray remained constant no matter what cathode material they originated from. From this evidence,
Thomson made the following conclusions:

 The cathode ray is composed of negatively charged particles.

 The particles must exist as part of the atom, since the mass of each particle is only 1/20 the mass of a

hydrogen atom.

 These subatomic particles can be found within atoms of all elements.

The plum pudding model
Thomson knew that atoms had an overall neutral charge. Therefore, he reasoned that there must be a
source of positive charge within the atom to counterbalance the negative charge on the electrons. This
led Thomson to propose that atoms could be described as negative particles floating within a soup of
diffuse positive charge. This model is often called the plum pudding model of the atom

The gold foil experiment

In 1911, Ernest Rutherford carried out an experiment where he bombarded very thin sheets of gold foil
around 100 atoms thick, with fast moving alpha particles. Alpha particles, a type of natural radioactive
particle, are positively charged particles with a mass about four times that of a hydrogen atom.

Because the vast majority of the alpha particles had passed through the gold, he reasoned that most of
the atom was empty space. In contrast, the particles that were highly deflected must have experienced a
tremendously powerful force within the atom. He concluded that all of the positive charge and the
majority of the mass of the atom must be concentrated in a very small space in the atom's interior,
which he called the nucleus.

 The nucleus is the tiny, dense, central core of the atom and is composed of protons. It contains
almost 99% of the mass of an atom.
 The Protons were deflected slower than the electrons, therefore were heavier than electrons.
Rutherford's atomic model became known as the nuclear model. In the nuclear atom, the protons and
neutrons, which comprise nearly all of the mass of the atom, are located in the nucleus at the center of
the atom. The electrons are distributed around the nucleus and occupy most of the volume of the atom.

Discovery of neutron
In May 1932, James Chadwick announced that the core also contained a new uncharged particle,
which he called the neutron.

Around 1930, several researchers, including German physicist Walter Bothe and his student Becker had
begun bombarding beryllium with alpha particles from a polonium source (Polonium is a very rare
natural element found in uranium ores) and studying the radiation emitted by the beryllium as a result.
Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie had studied the then-unidentified radiation from beryllium as it hit a
paraffin wax target. They found that this radiation knocked loose protons from hydrogen atoms in
that target, and those protons recoiled with very high velocity.

Joliot-Curie believed the radiation hitting the paraffin target must be high-energy gamma photons,
but Chadwick thought otherwise. Photons, having no mass, would not knock loose particles as heavy
as protons from the target, he reasoned. In 1932, he tried similar experiments himself, and became
convinced that the radiation ejected by the beryllium was in fact a neutral particle about the mass of
a proton. He also tried other targets in addition to the paraffin wax, including helium, nitrogen, and
lithium, which helped him determine that the mass of the new particle was just slightly more than
the mass of the proton.
  Chadwick also noted that because the neutrons had no charge, they penetrated much further
into a target than protons would.
 They also passed straight through the charged plates of a cathode ray tube.

Sub atomic Particles

Elementary particles are quarks, leptons and bosons.
These particles then join together to create the more
well-known particles, such as the neutron and the
proton. Such particles are known as composite
particles, as they are composed of two or more of
these elementary particles.

A quark is an elementary particle and a fundamental

constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form
particles called hadrons (the most stable of which are
protons and neutrons). Quarks cannot be observed
outside of hadrons. There are six types of quarks,
known as flavors: up, down, strange, charm, bottom,
and top.

A lepton is an elementary particle and a fundamental

constituent of matter. The best known of all leptons is
the electron. The two main classes of leptons are
charged leptons (also known as the electron-like
leptons), and neutral leptons (better known as
neutrinos).
 The emission spectrum of hydrogen
When a high-voltage electrical discharge is passed through a
sample of hydrogen gas at low pressure, the resulting individual
isolated hydrogen atoms caused by the dissociation of H2 emit a
red light. The color of the light emitted by the hydrogen atoms
does not depend greatly on the temperature of the gas in the
tube. When the emitted light is passed through a prism, only a
few narrow lines, called a line spectrum, which is a spectrum in
which light of only a certain wavelength is emitted or absorbed,
rather than a continuous range of wavelengths, rather than a
continuous range of colors. The light emitted by hydrogen atoms
is red because, of its four characteristic lines, the most intense
line in its spectrum is in the red portion of the visible spectrum,
at 656 nm. With sodium, however, we observe a yellow color
because the most intense lines in its spectrum are in the yellow
portion of the spectrum, at about 589 nm.

 The first emission spectrum of a hydrogen atom is the Balmer series, which was discovered by
scientist Johann Balmer in 1885. He showed that the frequencies of the lines observed in the
visible region of the spectrum of hydrogen fit a simple equation that can be expressed as
follows:
V = constant (1/22−1/n2)