series of experiments (1908–1913) by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, directed by Ernest Rutherford, at the University of Manchester, proving the existence of the atomic nucleus through alpha particle scattering on gold foil
A replica of an apparatus used by Geiger and Marsden to measure alpha particle scattering in a 1913 experiment The Rutherford scattering experiments were a landmark series of experiments by which scientists learned that every atom has a nucleus where all of its positive charge and most of its mass is concentrated. They deduced this after measuring how an alpha particle beam is scattered when it strikes a thin metal foil. The experiments were performed between 1906 and 1913 by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden under the direction of Ernest Rutherford at the Physical Laboratories of the University of Manchester.
The physical phenomenon was explained by Rutherford in a classic 1911 paper that eventually led to the widespread use of scattering in particle physics to study subatomic matter. Rutherford scattering or Coulomb scattering is the elastic scattering of charged particles by the Coulomb interaction. The paper also initiated the development of the planetary Rutherford model of the atom and eventually the Bohr model.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).