Abstract
THE new views of nuclear structure and the processes involved in neutron capture, presented by Prof. Niels Bohr in an address which appears elsewhere in this issue, were expounded by him in a lecture to the Chemical and Physical Society of University College, London, on February 11 and were illustrated by two pictures here reproduced. The first of these is intended to convey an idea of events arising out of a collision between a neutron and the nucleus. Imagine a shallow basin with a number of billiard balls in it as shown in the accompanying figure. If the basin were empty, then upon striking a ball from the outside, it would go down one slope and pass out on the opposite side with its original velocity. But with other balls in the basin, there would not be a free passage of this kind. The struck ball would divide its energy first with one of the balls in the basin, these two would similarly share their energies with others, and so on until the original kinetic energy was divided among all the balls. If the basin and the balls are regarded as perfectly smooth and elastic, the collisions would continue until the kinetic energy happens again to be concentrated upon a ball close to the edge. This ball would then escape from the basin and the remainder of the balls would be left with insufficient total energy for any of them to climb the slope. The picture illustrates, therefore, “that the excess energy of the incident neutron will be rapidly divided among all the nuclear particles with the result that for some time afterwards no single particle will possess sufficient kinetic energy to leave the nucleus”.
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Neutron Capture and Nuclear Constitution. Nature 137, 351 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137351a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137351a0