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Chadwick was convinced that alpha particles did not have enough energy to produce such powerful gamma-rays. He performed the beryllium bombardment experiments himself and interpreted that radiation as being composed of particles of mass approximately equal to that of the proton but without electrical charge—neutrons.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Chadwick repeated the creation of the radiation using beryllium to absorb the alpha particles: 9 Be + 4 He (α) → 12 C + 1 n. Following the Paris experiment, he aimed the radiation at paraffin wax, a hydrocarbon high in hydrogen content, hence offering a target dense with protons.
Discovery of the Neutron. In 1932, Chadwick made a fundamental discovery in the domain of nuclear science. Chadwick was fascinated by an experiment done by Frdric and Irne Joliot-Curie that studied the then-unidentified radiation from beryllium as it hit a paraffin wax target.
The story begins in 1932, with the discovery of the neutron by Sir James Chadwick, an English physicist. Until 1932, the atom was known to consist of a positively charged nucleus surrounded by enough negatively charged electrons to make the atom electrically neutral.
Sir James Chadwick, CH, FRS (20 October 1891 – 24 July 1974) was an English physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. In 1941, he wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspired the U.S. government to begin serious atom bomb research efforts.
- 20 October 1891, Bollington, Cheshire, United Kingdom
- Physics
James Chadwick, a former student of Ernest Rutherford, used radioactivity experiments to find evidence for a neutral particle in the nucleus. He called it a neutron and received the Nobel Prize in 1935 for his discovery.
One hypothesis was that this could be high-energy electromagnetic radiation. In 1932, however, James Chadwick proved that it consisted of a neutral particle with about the same mass as a proton. Ernest Rutherford had earlier proposed that such a particle might exist in atomic nuclei.
