Rutherfords Alpha-Particle

Scattering Experiment
By: Muhammad Asif, Talha Faisal,
Ahmad Hussain, Ibrahim Rafique &
Areeb Shaikh

Concept of the Experiment

If you wanted to know more about a dark room that you were unable
to go into, you might be able to get an idea of its size and contents by
throwing balls into the room and considering their behaviour (the sort
of task you might get in an Adventure game made for the computer).
you would be able to tell where obstacles were and roughly the size of
the room.
Physicists do the same kind of thing when 'looking at' tiny objects
such as atoms. In 1911 Rutherford wanted to find out more about the
structure of the atom so he set two of his research students (Geiger
and Marsden) the task of bombarding gold atoms with alpha particles,
gathering data as to what happened to the 'missiles' and making
deductions about the atom's structure from that data. In those days
they did not have particle accelerators providing a ready supply of
protons or neutrons so they had to use something that could be used
as a natural probe - alpha particles were ideal.

The Use of Alpha-Particles

Alpha particles are small (only two protons and two neutrons) and yet have enough
mass (4u) to be a suitable missile (lots of momentum).
They are produced naturally by radioactive nuclides that are alpha emitters (small
proton rich nuclei) and so a steady supply was easy to obtain. Their properties had
been under investigation for about a decade (much of it done by Rutherford!) and he
had been doing research into the fact that if he used high energy alpha particles they
were able to penetrate thin metal foil sheets when he came up with the idea of that
they would be ideal as a probe to atomic structure. He was expecting tiny changes in
trajectory as they met up with atomic substructure. Remember he thought of the
'atom' as the 'plum pudding' structure - he hadn't discovered the one you know about
yet.
The alpha source emits alpha particles randomly in all directions, but to study how
their path is altered we have to be sure that they only hit the foil at a fixed angle
(90O).To achieve this we must use acollimator. This absorbs all of the alpha particles
except those travelling in one direction - unless they are travelling parallel to the
sides of the outlet of the collimator they will impact on the side and be absorbed - so
only those travelling parallel to each other and in one direction get through!

The Foil
A single atom is too small to look at. It would be impossible to
get just one to examine. Therefore Rutherford decided to look
at a metal foil consisting of many atoms in a very thin sheet.
Gold was the ideal choice as gold can be rolled out into very
fine gold leaf sheets. These very fine sheets are only a few
atoms deep. Therefore gold foil would produce results of
interactions that could be best related to the interaction
between a single alpha and a single nucleus
If the foil was too thick the alpha particles would just be
absorbed. Remember that he expected most of them to just
go through but he knew that they could be absorbed by
thicker foils and even by a few centimetres of air.

The Evacuated Chamber:

It had to be performed in a vacuum because

the air would absorb the alpha particles before
they hit the foil or before they got to the screen!
The Zinc Sulphide Screen:

Zinc sulphide fluoresces (gives out a photon

of visible light) when it is hit by a charged
particle. Covering the microscope lens with ZnS
allowed the viewer to 'see' where the alpha
particles hit (or at least count their impacts).

Measuring the Angle

In order to find out how much the alpha particles had been deflected
from their path the microscope arm was connected to a turntable. It
could rotate around the vacuum filled drum and how far it had rotated
could be read off a vernier scale etched onto the turntable.
When the angle was zero (the straight through position) the number of
scintillations per minute on the screen would be high.
As the angle increased the number of scintillations per minute would be
much lower.
The really surprising result was the number than were 'backscattered' that made angles of greater than 90o with their original trajectory.
Rutherford was amazed, he said, 'It was quite the most incredible event
that has happened to me in my life! It was almost as incredible as if you
fired a 15" shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you!'

The Efforts
Less than 1 in 8,000 alpha particles back scattered. This
gives an indication of the tedious work involved in taking a
checking the results! They would have to be repeated
many times to be sure they were not due to anomalies!
Would you have been tempted to discount totally
inexplicable results and give your professor a set of results
he expected? Or would you, like Geiger and Marsden,
repeat and repeat and report the strange findings to
Rutherford so that a whole new model of the atom could be
developed? It is the careful (and honest!) investigation into
anomalies that often lead to new theories.
Nowadays this could be done with data logging and
computer analysis. In the early 1900s scientists had to do a
lot of painstaking measurements!

Alpha-Particle Scattering
Experiment

The Conclusion
When Rutherford mathematically investigated the results he proposed a model
that explained the results that Geiger and Marsden obtained.
The fact that the vast majority of the alpha particles got straight through led
Rutherford to propose that the atom was composed primarily of empty space.
The fact that backscattering occurred in 1 in 8000 alpha particles indicated
that there was a:
small(that was why so few were affected)
massive(meaning containing lots of mass - he knew the electrons had very little mass
and the fact that all of the positive charges were concentrated into a small area meant
that the mass was concentrated there too)
positively charged(because it repelled the alpha particles) nucleus in the centre of the
atom (neutrons had not been discovered at that time - so he made no mention of them!).

 So Rutherfords picture was one of the atom being

like the solar system the sun being the nucleus
(taking a very small proportion of the volume of the
solar system but being the vast bulk of the mass in
it) and the electrons being like the planets orbiting
the

'sun'.

This model was later amended by Bohr (to take into

account a couple of points that Rutherford's atom
did not fully explain the motion of the electrons
and the orbital paths that could explain what the
Chemists understood of electron behaviour in
bonding) to make the model of the atom that you
are taught at GCSE but it was still a magnificent
advance to our understanding of atomic structure.