Rutherford's Alpha Particle Scattering Experiment:The discovery of the Nucleus...

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Rutherford’s Alpha Particle Scattering Experiment:

The discovery of the Nucleus…

Rutherford was the world leader in alpha-particle physics. In 1906, at McGill, he had been the first to detect slight deflections of alphas on passage through matter. In 1907, he became a professor at the University of Manchester, where he worked with Hans Geiger. This was just a year after Rutherford's old boss, J. J. Thomson, had written a paper on his plum pudding atomic model suggesting that the number of electrons in an atom was about the same as the atomic number. (Not long before, people had speculated that atoms might contain thousands of electrons. They were assuming that the electrons contributed a good fraction of the atom's mass.)

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Rutherford's alpha scattering experiments were the first experiments in which individual particles were systematically scattered and detected. This is now the standard operating procedure of particle physics. Rutherford's partner in the initial phase of this work was Hans Geiger, who later developed the Geiger counter to detect and count fast particles.

The experiment was conducted, as is shown below. Alpha particles were fired from a source (from within a lead “shield”) at a sheet of thin gold foil (which had been beaten to about 400 atoms thick. A fluorescent screen was placed behind / around the gold foil. Every time ...

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Good grammar, punctuation and spelling throughout. Sources are not stated which should be done so that the right essays can be given credit, as if not it is plagiarism. The candidate should have used even a base referencing manner.

No clear introduction is used which would be good to introduce the topic and the concepts of the experiment. The candidate goes into the history behind the experiment well outlining other theories of the time, and how the setup of the experiment worked and the conclusions that could be drawn from it. The sections should be split up a little more clearly so we can follow the experiment a bit better, such as with spaced lining between paragraphs or sub-headings. The diagram included also helps define the experiment well.

Response to the question is done well and outlines the experiment and explains how the different theorys came about from the way the experiment went. To improve the candidate should have included more information on the plum pudding model and perhaps a diagram so they could explain better how the theory behind that was disproved.