I recently went to see Oppenheimer. In the film they talk about neutron bombardment to split an atom.
How exactly do you “fire” neutrons? I assume its not with some sort of gun lol
Do you put some material in a confined spce and the neutrons fizz around, eventually splitting an atom?
What is done practically?
Explanations welcome, thx
In: 10
In the early era of nuclear physics, neutrons were produced by bombarding beryllium metal with alpha particles produced by the decay of the radioactive element radium.
An alpha particle is the nucleus of a helium atom and beryllium is a very light element, so the impact of the alpha particle causes it to spit out a neutron. Later, researchers switched to radon as the source as it produces much more energetic alpha particles – but radon has a much shorter half life of just a few days and needs to be replaced regularly.
By the time research was going on into how uranium underwent fission and into the production of tiny samples of plutonium; the most effective way was to use one of the first particle accelerators, a cyclotron, to fire heavy hydrogen nuclei (deuterons) at beryllium to produce extremely energetic neutrons. This meant they could run experiments for hours, days and weeks – such as to produce the first microgram quantities of plutonium.
In the bombs themselves, neutrons were produced by mixing polonium – a ferocious alpha source – with beryllium in devices known as initiators at the point of detonation. The initiator for the Trinity test and the Nagasaki bomb was called ‘The Urchin’. Modern bombs use tiny particle accelerators which are ‘safer’ and more controllable.
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