Discovery
The Auger emission process was discovered in 1922 by Lise Meitner, an Austrian-Swedish physicist, as a side effect in her competitive search for the nuclear beta electrons with the British physicist Charles Drummond Ellis. The French physicist Pierre Victor Auger also discovered it in 1923 upon analysis of a Wilson cloud chamber experiment and it became the central part of his PhD work. High-energy X-rays were applied to ionize gas particles and observe photoelectric electrons. Observation of electron tracks independent of the frequency of the incident photon suggested a mechanism for electron ionization that was caused from an internal conversion of energy from a radiationless transition. Further investigation and theoretical work showed that the effect was a radiationless effect more than an internal conversion effect by use of elementary quantum mechanics and transition rate and transition probability calculations.
Read more about this topic: Auger Effect
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic.... It is all the more serious since, with the loss of my rule V, not only the foundations of my arithmetic, but also the sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem to vanish.”
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“That the discovery of this great truth, which lies so near and obvious to the mind, should be attained to by the reason of so very few, is a sad instance of the stupidity and inattention of men, who, though they are surrounded with such clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of light.”
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“The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)