Abstract
IT has been our aim for years to prove the result of transmutation experiments by chemical analysis, and in a brief report1 we have described our failure to find chemical evidence for the production of hydrogen or neon by bombardment with rays. In the meantime, many new ways of artificial transmutation have been found, and the discovery of artificial radio-elements has enabled Curie and Joliot2 to use the methods of radio-chemistry, that is, the combination of radioactive measurement with chemical operations, for the investigation of the chemical character of products of artificial transmutation. This line of work has been extended by Fermi and his collaborators and by many others. The quantity of newly formed matter has in general been much too small for any attempt at a purely chemical detection ; the claim3 of having separated and spectroscopically observed helium of atomic weight 3, made from heavy hydrogen, has been disproved by later work4.
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References
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The ordinarily assumed yield of neutrons under these conditions is 1,000 neutrons per sec. (See, for example, E. Fermi and collaborators, Proc. Roy. Soc., A, 146, 483; 1934.) According to R. Jaeckel's observations (Z. Phys., 91, 493; 1934) the value 10,000 neutrons per sec. is more likely.
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PANETH, F., LOLEIT, H. Chemical Detection of Artificial Transmutation of Elements. Nature 136, 950 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136950a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136950a0
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