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Early Nuclear Physics Essay

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1 Introduction
1.1 A Brief History of Early Nuclear Physics
In the early 1900s it was seen that a small number of alpha particles were deflected by a large angle, the current model at the time predicted only small deflections of the particles. These results were explained by introducing a tiny positively charged nucleus into our picture of the atom. Although beta decay had been observed as early as 1896 and was known to contain electrons, it wasn’t until 1914 that they would break the law of energy conservation if just composed of electrons. To account for the discrepancy in energy during beta decay, Wolfgang Pauli suggested that a very light, neutral charged particle was also released during beta decay, this particle was named the …show more content…

There are numerous models that have been used to describe nuclear structure and the physical properties that arise. A mathematical model can be scrutinised in a large number of ways, does the model agree with existing data, can the model be used to make physical predictions, what assumptions are made etc.. Currently a large factor used in deciding whether to use a model, is the dif- ficulty in solving this mathematical model to produce physical values. A much more complicated model may give the most accurate results, but the difficulty in obtaining any result e.g. the computational time required, is not worth the gain in accuracy. A trade off must be made in deciding on the physical model to be used in the situation. In this article a number of different models will be discussed, the formulation and the uses of these models will be studied, as well as there uses in physics. Due to the vast number of areas that nuclear physics is used, such as in cancer treatments, material processing etc. improvements in our nuclear models are very important and not just studied for scientific curiosity. [3]
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2 Modelling Nuclear Structure
2.1 Macroscopic Modelling of nuclear structure (The Liquid Drop Model)
It is important to have models of nuclear structures and interactions, to both describe the observations
made

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