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Chemistry library
Course: Chemistry library > Unit 7
Lesson 1: History of atomic structureRutherford’s gold foil experiment
Learn about Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus and the development of the nuclear model of the atom.
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- Why did Rutherford pick gold, and not any other element for the experiment.(52 votes)
- Since gold is the most malleable material, and the gold foil that he made was only 1000 atoms thick !(36 votes)
- in this the speaker says that 1 out of 20,000 of alpha particles hit the nucleus of the atom. is that not possible that one of the alpha particles might hit the electrons present in the atom? if not perfect bouncing back of the alpha particle but atleast a slightest change in the direction of the particle...?(19 votes)
- Compared to the alpha particles, the electrons are quite small...So he could make out that there is something else stopping the way of the alpha particles....Which led to the discovery of the nucleus!(9 votes)
- A very interesting Question. How did Rutherford come to know that alpha particles are bouncing back? I mean, an alpha particle is so tiny. Tinier than atom. It may be not that he saw the particles. But still, how did he guess that particles are bouncing?(13 votes)
- Well, that is quite an interesting question. You see, the
detector
the speaker speaks about here is actually a film of Zinc Sulphide positioned around the gold foil, with a small space to let the alpha particles, as mentioned by the speaker. Now, the Zinc Sulphide screen has fluorescent properties, i.e., when the scattered alpha particles hit the Zinc Sulphide screen, the points where they hit the screen glow with a noticeable fluorescent light.
Hence, Rutherford was able to see where the scattered alpha particles hit. True, he could not see the particles themselves, but he could see the POINT where they hit the screen, hence deducing that they got deflected in small and large angles. Hope this helped clear your doubt.(25 votes)
- why did not alpha particles being positively charged interact with the electrons of the gold atom?(8 votes)
- Well, the electrons of the gold atom were held there by the nucleus (or the 79 protons) of the gold atom. Alpha particles only have 2 protons, so the positive charge is not strong enough to attract the electrons in the gold atom. It might have definitely interacted, with the electrons "pulling" them toward themselves, which result in a tiny force which pushed the alpha particles straight through the atom and out of it.
Hope that helps. :)
P.S.: Oh well, I just saw that the question was asked 4 years ago. Maybe it might help others?? :)(12 votes)
- why is the nucleas round ? why is it not square or cuboid or something else ! also whats to use of nucleas ? i mean what does it do for atom ?(7 votes)
- A study published in the journal 'nature' measuring the shape of the nucleus of a Radium-224 (Ra-224) atom. The result is strange; the nucleus is not shaped like a European football (sphere) or even an American football (ellipsoid). The 88 protons and 136 neutrons are packed into the shape of a pear, sporting a big bulge on one end.
What do atoms look like? This is actually an impossible question to answer: Atoms are so tiny that we can't see them using light, even looking through the most powerful lenses and microscopes.
So I think research is still going on to find out the shape of the nucleus. I think for easier and better understanding we imagine the shape of the nucleus as spherical.(6 votes)
- Why did Rutherford think they would go straight through if at the time they thought most of the atom was made of positive mass?(7 votes)
- Because the alpha particles are very heavy and moving very fast, they should be able to push through the "jelly" of positive charge.(6 votes)
- why did the alpha particles deflect?describe?(3 votes)
- Alpha particles have two protons and two neutrons so they are positively charged. If they pass too close to the nucleus of the atoms in the gold foil, their straight path might change because the protons in the nuclei of the gold particles in the gold foil can repel alpha particles (like-charges repel)(12 votes)
- What is the weight of the alpha particle?(1 vote)
- It is composed of 2 neutrons and 2 protons, so 4 amu.(12 votes)
- So was the gold foil the only substance in which Rutherford could have used to see if particles passed through it(1 vote)
- He used a wide variety of other metal foils, such as aluminium, iron, and lead, but the gold foil experiment gets the most publicity.(6 votes)
- is the Helium2+ means that the Helium atom have no electrons?(3 votes)
- Precisely: an alpha particle consists of two protons and two neutrons, which together is the equivalent of a helium nucleus, or a helium ion which lost two of its electrons.(3 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] This is
a quote by a physicist as a comment on one of
his experimental results. He said, about his experiment, he said, "It was as if you fired a 15-inch shell "at a piece of tissue paper, "and it came back and hit you." So let's talk about his
experiment and what he was doing. Rutherford, at the time, had
been doing a lot of research on radioactivity. He was friends with Marie
Curie and her husband, Pierre. And he had done a lot of studies looking at the different
kinds of reactivity, and more specifically, he
was curious at this time about alpha particles, which are, actually, at the time, he didn't know what they were, but we now know they are Helium, 2+ nuclei. So that means we have two
protons in the nucleus, since it's Helium, and
it also has two neutrons. And it doesn't have any
electrons, and thus, it has a 2+ charge. So what Rutherford did,
he took a piece of radium and he put it inside a lead box. And the lead box had a
small hole in it on one side so that the radioactive alpha particles could come out of that hole in
the direction that he wanted. And then, he shot the alpha particles at a piece of gold foil, a very thin piece of gold foil. And he was curious to see if
he could learn a little bit about the structure of the
atom using this experiment. So, if we look back at our quote, we would say that our
alpha particles here, the alpha particles are the bullets that are coming out of our
alpha particle gun, and gold foil is our tissue paper. And we have these pretty fast and massive alpha particles that we're shooting at it. But why was Rutherford
expecting that to happen here? It's not necessarily straightforward, at least to me, why you would
think these alpha particles would just go straight
through the gold foil. So what Rutherford, at
the time, was doing was, he was testing the plum pudding model. So this is pretty early
in history, where we, we being scientists way back then, knew that J. J. Thomson,
another physicist, had just discovered electrons. So we knew the atom, the atom had these particles
in it that were small, that were really small,
we knew that they were less than one percent the
mass of a Hydrogen atom, so way smaller than an atom. And we knew they were negatively charged, so I'm going to call them electrons 'cause we know they're electrons now. And so J. J. Thomson knew that electrons existed based on his experimental results, and he proposed, based on his results, that an atom looks something
like a plum pudding. And if you don't know
what a plum pudding is, because maybe you're not British, or maybe you just don't like dessert, you can also imagine it
looking something like a chocolate chip cookie. So we have these little
negatively-charged particles that are stuck inside the atom, but most of the atom is made up of a positively-charged soup. And this was mainly because the atom overall has to be neutral. Scientists knew that atoms were neutral, so there had to be something there to cancel out the negative
charge of the electron. So because Rutherford was starting with this in his mind for what the gold atoms looked like, he could actually do
mathematical predictions on what the alpha particles would do. And what he predicted was that they would just go straight through. You can use physics equations
to look at the electric field that's generated by this
positively-charged soup, and it turns out that the field, because the charge is spread
out all over the atom, the field is very weak. And so, what he thought would happen was that all the particles
would just go straight through and then, occasionally, one
might be bent a little bit. Since we do have a positively-charged soupy atom, depending on where the
alpha particle goes through, he thought you might see a
little bit of deflection, but mostly, they should
go straight through. And I guess we started with a spoiler, 'cause we know that he didn't
quite get what he expected. So what exactly did Rutherford see? Well, he shot his alpha
particles at his tissue paper, and he saw most of the
particles go straight through, just as he expected. In fact, he saw almost all the particles go straight through. He saw a couple of them
be deflected a little bit, so they got deflected off their path maybe about one degree, so barely enough to be able to see it. And, if he had not been a curious chemist, we would maybe still think, right now, that this is what an atom looks like. But luckily, Rutherford was
a very thorough chemist, and he also thought,
it might be interesting to detect whether particles came, not just here, he didn't just put a detector screen here, he put a detector screen
that went all the way around. So, all the way around,
almost all the way around, giving enough space for the
alpha particles to go in. And he was being really careful here, 'cause he didn't really
expect to see anything right around here or here or here, or really anywhere except for here. But it turned out that for every one in... one in 20,000 alpha particles, or some crazy-tiny number like that, for every one in 20,000 alpha particles, he saw the particles hit the gold foil and bounce back. And that's crazy, right? That's exactly what you don't expect when you hit a piece of
tissue paper with a bullet. So the first thing he did, I think, was not go, hmmm, this is really crazy, we just won a Nobel Prize here. I'm pretty sure the
first thing he did was, this is weird. And then he probably checked
his experimental results. And he tried to repeat it, and he checked everything to make sure nothing was going wrong, and it turned out that, yes, something was actually happening. This one in 20,000 alpha
particles was real. So what did this mean? This meant that we needed
a new atomic model. We had to explain, somehow,
that a tiny fraction of the alpha particles
was getting bounced back. So how did he do this? He knew there was something in the atom that was tiny, massive, and positively charged. And he knew that it had to be tiny because not very many alpha particles interacted with it, 'cause most of them went straight through. He knew that it had to be massive and positively charged
because, well, the electrons are really small, and
most of the particles went straight through. So whatever these particles
were interacting with had to be very small but really heavy, which is how they bounced right back. So he made a new model of the atom that incorporated these requirements. And what he said was that there must be something in
there with these properties, which we now call the nucleus. And it's really tiny, in fact he was able to
calculate, not exactly. He was able to calculate
approximately how big it was based on how many alpha particles hit it, and he said it was approximately 1/10,000 of the volume of the atom. And then, what else do we have? We know we have this nucleus,
which is positively-charged and tiny and massive. And then we also have our electrons. And then what's the
rest of the atom doing? Based on all of this, that
means most of the atom is actually empty space. Since the electrons are really small and the nucleus only takes up 1/10,000 of the radius, the rest of that space
is all just nothing, which is kind of crazy, so
based on this particular model that Rutherford made next, he was able to explain his results. He was able to explain that
most of the alpha particles just went straight through,
and then every now and then, an alpha particle would come
really close to the nucleus, and then that would get
defected a little bit, and even more rare, an
alpha particle may hit a nucleus straight on,
and then it would get bounced off because the
nucleus is super-heavy and because it is positively charged, so it would repel the
positively-charged alpha particle. Rutherford called this particular model, or we call it now, I'm
not sure which, actually, he called it the Nuclear Model. This actually looks pretty similar to the modern picture of the atom that most people think of. There's a lot of questions that
are still not answered here, like what exactly the electrons are doing. Or where are they? Where are the electrons? But because Rutherford
proposed this new model, other scientists were able
to design new expiriments to test it. And not very long afterward,
we had a pretty good picture of what was going on on the level of the atom.