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.
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