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Hundred years ago, amidst glowing glass tubes and the hum of electricity, the British physicist J.J Thomson. was venturing into the interior of the atom. At the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, Thomson was experimenting with currents of electricity inside empty glass tubes. He was investigating a long-standing puzzle known as "cathode rays." His experiments prompted him to make a bold proposal: these mysterious rays are streams of particles much smaller than atoms, they are in fact minuscule pieces of atoms. He called these particles "corpuscles," and suggested that they might make up all of the matter in atoms. It was startling to imagine a particle residing inside the atom--most people thought that the atom was indivisible, the most fundamental unit of matter.
J.J Thomson
During the 1880s and 90s scientists searched cathode rays for the carrier of the electrical properties in matter. Their work culminated in the discovery by English physicist J.J. Thomson of the electron in 1897. The existence of the electron showed that the 2,000-year-old conception of the atom as a homogeneous particle was wrong and that in fact the atom has a complex structure. Cathode-ray studies began in 1854 when Heinrich Geissler, a glassblower and technical assistant to the German physicist Julius Plcker, improved the vacuum tube. Plcker discovered cathode rays in 1858 by sealing two electrodes inside the tube, evacuating the air, and forcing electric current between the electrodes. He found a green glow on the wall of his glass tube and attributed it to rays emanating from the cathode. In 1869, with better vacuums, Plckers pupil Johann W. Hittorf saw a shadow cast by an object placed in front of the cathode. The shadow proved that the cathode rays originated from the cathode. The English physicist and chemist William Crookes investigated cathode rays in 1879 and found that they were bent by a magnetic field; the direction of deflection suggested that they were negatively charged particles. As the luminescence did not depend on what gas had been in the vacuum or what metal the electrodes were made of, he surmised that the rays were a property of the electric current itself. As a result of Crookess work, cathode rays were widely studied, and the tubes came to be called Crookes tubes
CANAL RAYS
Anode rays (or Canal rays) were observed in experiments by a German scientist, Eugen Goldstein, in 1886. Goldstein used a gas discharge tube which had a perforated cathode. A "ray" is produced in the holes (canals) in the cathode and travels in a direction opposite to the "cathode rays," which are streams of electrons. Goldstein called these positive rays "Kanalstrahlen" - canal rays because it looks like they are passing through a canal. In 1907 a study of how this "ray" was deflected in a magnetic field, revealed that the particles making up the ray were not all the same mass. The lightest, formed when there was a little hydrogen in the tube, was calculated to be 1837 times as massive as an electron. They were protons
J. J. Thomson's raisin bread model (plum pudding model) J. J. Thomson considered that the structure of an atom is something like a raisin bread, so that his atomic model is sometimes called the raisin bread model. He assumed that the basic body of an atom is a spherical object containing N electrons confined in homogeneous jellylike but relatively massive positive charge distribution whose total charge cancels that of the N electrons. The schematic drawing of this model is shown in the following figure. Thomson's model is sometimes dubbed a plum pudding model.
Rutheford made a theoretical analysis of angles of scattering in accordance with Thomson's theory of atom and in accordance with his own theory. He assumed that atom consisted of positive charged nucleus and negative charged electrons circling around the nucleus. Then his theoretic calculations he compared with the experiment result. Alpha particles going through atom created in accordance with the "plum cake" model wouldn't be strong abberated because the electric field in that atom wouldn't be strong. In the model created by Rutheford the field is much stronger near to the nucleus, so some of alpha particles are much more abberated. The other going in the far distance to the nucleus are almost not at all abberated. The probability that any alpha particle will hit the nucleus is small but there is such a chance.