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Physics Lesson 20.3.1 - Natural Radioactivity. Becquerel's Experiment
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Welcome to our Physics lesson on Natural Radioactivity. Becquerel's Experiment, this is the first lesson of our suite of physics lessons covering the topic of Radioactivity and Half-Life, you can find links to the other lessons within this tutorial and access additional physics learning resources below this lesson.
More on Natural Radioactivity. Becquerel's Experiment
Becquerel's experiment on natural radioactivity consists on the following procedure:
The radioactive material emits radiation in the form of a narrow beam because of the collimator (a device for producing a parallel beam of rays or radiation). The traces resulted in the photograph plate were deflected from their linear path, as shown in the figure.
The reason for this deflection of radioactive beam from their linear path is their interaction with the magnetic field after flowing out of collimator. These are not the standard X-rays, as X-rays rays cannot be deflected by magnetic field (as X-rays do not carry any electric charge to interact with magnetic field). Hence, obviously the radiation emitted by collimator is electrically charged. From this fact, we can obtain the definition of radioactivity as a phenomenon naturally occurring in materials:
Radioactivity is the phenomenon of emission of ionizing radiation or particles caused by the spontaneous disintegration of atomic nuclei.
When different radioactive materials were used in the experiment, different behavior of the corresponding beams was observed. Thus, in some cases there was a deflection due left, in other cases due right and in a few cases there was no deflection at all. This means that from the electric point of view, there are three types of radiations emitted by radioactive materials: positive, negative and neutral. Rutherford named them as alpha (α), beta (β) and gamma (γ) radiation respectively.
The term "radioactive" was first used by the Curie consorts (Pierre and Marie Curie), whose work on this field is invaluable. They managed to isolate some radioactive elements such as radium (Ra), uranium (U) and polonium (Po).
Now, let's explain more in detail each type of radiation mentioned above.
You have reached the end of Physics lesson 20.3.1 Natural Radioactivity. Becquerel's Experiment. There are 5 lessons in this physics tutorial covering Radioactivity and Half-Life, you can access all the lessons from this tutorial below.
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