From: owner-ammf-digest@smoe.org (alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest) To: ammf-digest@smoe.org Subject: alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest V14 #6827 Reply-To: ammf@fruvous.com Sender: owner-ammf-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ammf-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest Wednesday, June 23 2021 Volume 14 : Number 6827 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Build Any Wood Working Project This Summer ["Easy Shed Plans" Subject: Build Any Wood Working Project This Summer Build Any Wood Working Project This Summer http://shedplanx.us/BTsX4adMqIgupUiv4giWe70-Z2T7sBSq9IhvI0_LUqTKkGc http://shedplanx.us/4LR6j3ppTAcJbJV2nhrawOP9ROKmYOChWHbEdxKW7ApuxkzN ey noted that radioactivity continued after the neutron emissions ceased. Not only had they discovered a new form of radioactive decay in the form of positron emission, they had transmuted an element into a hitherto unknown radioactive isotope of another, thereby inducing radioactivity where there had been none before. Radiochemistry was now no longer confined to certain heavy elements, but extended to the entire periodic table. Chadwick noted that being electrically neutral, neutrons would be able to penetrate the nucleus more easily than protons or alpha particles. Enrico Fermi and his colleagues in RomebEdoardo Amaldi, Oscar D'Agostino, Franco Rasetti and Emilio SegrC(bpicked up on this idea. Rasetti visited Meitner's laboratory in 1931, and again in 1932 after Chadwick's discovery of the neutron. Meitner showed him how to prepare a polonium-beryllium neutron source. On returning to Rome, Rasetti built Geiger counters and a cloud chamber modelled after Meitner's. Fermi initially intended to use polonium as a source of alpha particles, as Chadwick and Curie had done. Radon was a stronger source of alpha particles than polonium, but it also emitted beta and gamma rays, which played havoc with the detection equipment in the laboratory. But Rasetti went on his Easter vacation without preparing the polonium-beryllium source, and Fermi realised that since he was interested in the products of the reaction, he could irradiate his sample in one laboratory and test it in another down the hall. The neutron source was easy to prepare by mixing with powdered beryllium in a sealed capsule. Moreover, radon was easily obtained; Giulio Cesare Trabacchi had more than a gram of radium and was happy to supply Fermi with radon. With a half-life of only 3.82 days it would only go to waste otherwise, and the radium continually produced more. Enrico Fermi and his research group (the Via Panisperna boys), circa 1934. Left to right: Oscar D'Agostino, Emilio SegrC(, Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti and Fermi. Working in assembly-line fashion, they started by irradiating water, and then progressed up the periodic table through lithium, beryllium, boron and carbon, without inducing any radioactivity. When they got to aluminium and then fluorine, they had their first successes. Induced radioactivity was ultimately found through the neutron bombardment of 22 different elements. Meitner was one of the select group of physicists to whom Fermi mailed advance copies of his papers, and she was able to report that she had verified his findings with respect to aluminium, silicon, phosphorus, copper and zinc. When a new copy of La Ricerca Scientifica arrived at the Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, her nephew, Otto Frisch, as the only physicist there who could read Italian, found himself in demand from colleagues wanting a translation. The Rome group had no samples of the rare earth metals, but at Bohr's institute George de Hevesy had a complete set of their oxides that had been given to him by Auergesellschaft, so de Hevesy and Hilde Levi carried out the process with them. When the Rome group reached uranium, they had a problem: the radioactivity of natural uranium was almost as great as that of their neutron source. What they observed was a complex mixture of half-lives. Following the displacement law, they checked for the presence of lead, bismuth, radium, actinium, thorium and protactinium (skipping the elements whose chemical properties were unknown), and (correctly) found no indication of any of them. Fermi noted three types of reactions were caused by neutron irradiation: emission of an alpha particle (n, ?); proton emission (n, p); and gamma emission (n, ?). Invariably, the new isotopes decayed by beta emission, which caused elements to move up the periodic table. Based on the periodic table of the time, Fermi believed that element 93 was ekarheniumbthe element below rheniumbwith characteristics similar to manganese and rhenium. Such an element was found, and Fermi tentatively concluded that his experiments had created new elements with 93 and 94 protons, which he dubbed ausonium and hesperium. The results were published in Nature in June 1934. However, in this paper Fermi cautioned that "a careful search for such heavy particles has not yet been carried out, as they require for their observation that the active product should be in the form of a very thin layer. It seems therefore at present premature to form any definite hypothesis on the chain of disintegrations involved." In retrospect, what they had detected was indeed an unknown rhenium-like element, technetium, which lies between manganese and rhenium on the periodic table. Leo Szilard and Thomas A. Chalmers reported that neutrons generated by gamma rays acting on beryllium were captured by iodine, a reaction that Fermi had also noted. When Meitner repeated their experiment, she found that neutrons from the gamma-beryllium sources were captured by heavy elements like iodine, silver and gold, but not by lighter ones like sodium, aluminium and silicon. She concluded that slow neutrons were more likely to be captured than fast ones, a finding she reported to Naturwissenschaften in October 1934. Everyone had been thinking that energetic neutrons were required, as was the case with alpha particles and protons, but that was required to overcome the Coulomb barrier; the neutrally charged neutrons were more likely to be captured by the nucleus if they spent more time in its vicinity. A few days later, Fermi considered a curiosity that his group had noted: uranium seemed to react differently in different parts of the laboratory; neutron irradiation conducted on a wooden table induced more radioactivity than on a marble table in the same room. Fermi thought about this and tried placing a piece of paraffin wax between the neutron source and the uranium. This resulted in a dramatic increase in activity. He reasoned that the neutrons had been slowed by collisions with hydrogen atoms in the paraffin and wood. The departure of D'Agostino meant that the Rome group no longer had a chemist, and the subsequent loss of Rasetti and SegrC( reduced the group to just Fermi and Amaldi, who abandoned the research into transmutation to concentrate on exploring the physics of slow neutrons. The current model of the nucleus in 1934 was the liquid drop model first proposed by George Gamow in 1930. His simple and elegant model was refined and developed by Carl Friedrich von WeizsC$cker and, after the discovery of the neutron, by Werner Heisenberg in 1935 and Niels Bohr in 1936, it agreed closely with observations. In the model, the nucleons were held together in the smallest possible volume (a sphere) by the strong nuclear force, which was capable of overcoming the longer ranged Coulomb electrical repulsion between the protons. The model remained in use for certain applications into the 21st century, when it attracted the attention of mathematicians interested in its properties, but in its 1934 form it confirmed what physicists thought they already knew: that nuclei were static, and that the odds of a collision chipping off more than an alpha particle were practically zero ------------------------------ End of alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest V14 #6827 **********************************************