Abstract
The experiments conducted by Ernest Rutherford’s students Geiger and Marsden in 1911, in which they measured the scattering amplitude of α particles from gold foils produced the surprising result that α particles could be deflected to large angles from their original trajectories.
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Notes
- 1.
Rutherford published “The scattering of alpha and beta particles by matter and the structure of the atom,” in the Philosophical Magazine in 1911. 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.”
- 2.
Balmer published his “Notiz über die Spectrallinien des Wasserstoffs” in the Annalen der Physik und Chimie. He was 60 years old at the time.
- 3.
Rydberg had, in fact, discovered his formula in 1887, evidenced by an appendix he attached to a request for financial support from the Royal Academy. His “Recherches…” was published in Kungliga Svenska Vetenskapsakademien, Handlignar.
- 4.
Bohr’s “On the constitution of atoms and molecules” was published in three parts in the Philosophical Magazine in 1913. Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 “for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and the radiation emanating from them.”
- 5.
Heisenberg’s “Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer and mechanischer Beziehungeen,” was published in the Zeitschrift für Physik in 1925. Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932 “for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen.”
- 6.
Born was ultimately awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 “for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction. Born shared the prize with the German physicist Walther Bothe who was cited “for the coincidence method and his discoveries made therewith.”
- 7.
Dirac’s “The fundamental equations of quantum mechanics” was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1925 and “On the theory of quantum mechanics” was published in the same journal the subsequent year.
- 8.
Technically, a similarity transformation takes the form A ′ = B −1 AB, where the matrices A and A ′ are called similar. For unitary matrices, U † ≡ U −1.
- 9.
Von Neumann’s Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik was published in 1932.
- 10.
Part of the somewhat tepid response to Feynman’s original articles on quantum electrodynamics arose because he did not frame his theory in terms of operators on a functional space, as did Schwinger and Tomonaga. Dyson, nonetheless, recognized the connection and provided impetus to using Feynman’s techniques as computational aids.
- 11.
We use a notation here that emphasizes the matrix element mathematical structure but α and β are not, in general, integer indices.
- 12.
Schrödinger published “Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem” in Annalen der Physik in four parts in 1926. Schrödinger and Dirac were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.”
- 13.
Fock published his “Konfigurationsraum und zweite Quantelung” in the Zeitschrift für Physik in 1932.
- 14.
Pauli published “Über den Zusammenhang des Abschlusses der Electronengruppen im Atom mit der Komplexstruktur der Spektren” in Zeitschrift für Physik in 1925. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945 “for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle.”
- 15.
Hartree published “The wave mechanics of an atom with a non-Coulomb central field” in two parts in the Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1928.
- 16.
Walther Kohn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998 “for his development of the density-functional theory,” and shared the prize with John Pople, who was cited “for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry.”
- 17.
Becke published “A new mixing of Hartree-Fock and local density-functional theories” in the Journal of Chemical Physics in 1993.
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© 2018 Mark A. Cunningham
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Cunningham, M.A. (2018). On Atoms. In: Beyond Classical Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63160-8_4
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