Dahl P.F. From Nuclear Transmutation to Nuclear Fission, 1932-1939

Bristol and Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 2002. — 317 p. — ISBN 0 7503 0865 6.The present volume deals with a particular phase of the early history of experimental nuclear physics: what in effect became a race, circa 1930, between four laboratory teams to be the first to achieve the transmutation of atomic nuclei with artificially accelerated nuclear projectiles (protons) in high-voltage discharge tubes or vacuum chambers. (Experiments 15 years earlier under Ernest Rutherford had relied on alpha-particles from radium sources in the disintegration of nitrogen nuclei.) The laboratories and their team leaders were John D Cockcroft at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England; Merle A Tuve at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; Ernest О Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory and Department of Physics of the University of California in Berkeley; and Charles С Lauritsen at the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA.Preface. Acknowledgments.
Prologue.
The english stage is set.
American beginnings.
How many volts?
Protons, electrons, and gamma-rays.
Protons east and west.
Giants of electricity.
1932.
Runners up.
Deuterium.
The americans forge ahead.
Fission: return of lightfoot.
Epilogue.
Select bibliography. Name index. Subject index.