Vérification expérimentale de la formule de Lorentz-Einstein

Abstract

THIS memoir gives a detailed account of experiments made by MM. Guye and Ratnowsky in 1907–9, and by MM. Guye and Lavanchy in 1911–13, with the object of testing the mass-formulæ of Abraham and of Lorentz for the cathode-ray corpuscles. Preliminary notices of these researches have appeared from time to time, but now they are published in their final form, preceded by a theoretical and historical introduction of twenty pages, whilst twenty pages are devoted to the experiments of Guye and Ratnowsky, and forty pages to those of Guye and Lavanchy; the whole concludes with a small collection of tables and plates. There are records of twenty - seven experiments by Guye and Ratnowsky for the range from β= 0.21 to β= 0.59, and of 151 experiments by Guye and Lavanchy from β= 0.25 to β= 0.49. The first series of experiments gives for the excess of the observed mass of the electron above the Lorentz mass a mean value of five thousandths, and for that above the Abraham mass a mean value of nineteen thousandths, with a probable error of about three thousandths; the second gives for the same quantities two tenthousandths, eleven thousandths, and one two-thousandth respectively. Thus the evidence of these investigations is strongly in favour of the Lorentz mass formula, in complete agreement with previous researches of similar rank, such as those of Bucherer, Wolz, and Neumann on β-rays, and of Hupka on accelerated photo-electrons.

Vérification expérimentale de la formule de Lorentz-Einstein.

Par Prof. Ch.-Eug. Guye, en collaboration successive avec S. Ratnowsky et Ch. Lavanchy. (Mémoires de la Société de Physique et d'Histoire naturelle de Genève, vol. 39, fasc. 6.) Pp. 273–364 + plates 4–6. (Genève: Muséum d'Histoire naturelle, 1921.) 20 francs.