Manhattan Project: The Story of the Century, by Bruce Cameron Reed. Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2020,: Cham, Switzerland. ISBN 978-3-030-45733-4, xiv + 553 pp., 127 b/w and 25 color illustrations, $49.99 (hbk).

SWITZERLAND; DAMASCUS (Syria)

The continuing experiments with light elements bombarded by energetic alpha-particles were fulfilled by German physicists W. Bothe and H. Becker, French researchers Marie and Frederic Joliot-Curie, and English physicist J. Chadwick who realized that the energy emitted in those reactions was taken not by gamma-quants but by neutral particles with mass close to protons - in 1935 he was awarded with the Nobel Prize for discovery of neutrons. This was because Heisenberg had become convinced that as the temperature of a pile began to increase, the fission cross-section would decrease, with the result that the process would be self-regulating and stabilize at a temperature he estimated about 800 C. The flaw in his reasoning was that the rate of fissions is proportional to the product of the neutron speed, increasing with temperature, and the fission cross-section, which is inversely proportional to the speed, so the two effects largely cancel each other, leaving the rate of fissions unchanged. Bohr worked on the liquid-droplet model of nuclei and published a paper describing the uranium and thorium fission behavior under bombardment by fast and slow neutrons, showing that the rare isotope U-235 must be responsible for the slow-neutron fission in uranium samples with abundance of stable U-238. A Danish physicist Møller told Frisch that the fission fragments with enough energy can eject a neutron or two, which might go on to induct more fissions and lead to a chain-reaction. [Extracted from the article]

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