Abstract
IN his Bakerian lecture delivered before the Royal Society on May 25 and recently published (Proc. Roy. Soc., A, Oct.), Dr. J. Chadwick gave an account of recent work on the neutron. It is now well known that neutrons are produced by bombarding light elements with a-particles, and neutrons have been detected from all the elements up to aluminium, with the exception of helium, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen. These exceptions are to be expected from the general rules of nuclear structure, for in all known nuclei, the atomic mass A is equal to or greater than 2Z and this condition would be violated by the new nuclei formed by the disintegration of the elements named with emission of a neutron. Some elements, for example, aluminium and fluorine, may disintegrate, giving either a neutron or a proton, and since these elements are isotopically simple, these are really alternative processes.
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The Neutron. Nature 132, 976–977 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132976b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132976b0