Notes on Modern Physics and Ionizing Radiation

Mr. Donald Groff introduced me to the Franck-Hertz and Millikan Oil Drop experiments in 1965.

Professor William A. Fowler brought nuclear physics alive for me in 1969-70 with his application of it to astrophysics and particularly stellar nucleosynthesis.

I first learned the details of X-ray crystallography in 1974 from conversations with Dr. James R. Milch and studying Woolfson (1970). My understanding of those details was considerably enhanced by taking Professor Robert Langridge's course on the subject.

My knowledge of error analysis is based on Wilson (1952) and Bevington (1969), considerably enhanced by discussions with Jim Fry and Sol Gruner. Useful comments have been made about Chapter II by D. Fenner, K. Rajnak, and D. Winch. Wayne Wright, Stan Rajnak, Larry Wilson, Ralph Deal, and Jan Tobochnik reviewed draft versions in some detail. I particularly thank them for their efforts and hope that they will not find them to have been in vain.

The presentations of diffraction and other experiment background owe much to the work of my colleagues Drs. Wayne M. Wright and David M. Winch, and to my predecessor in teaching both Intermediate Modern Physics and Medical Physics at Kalamazoo College, Dr. Allen Van Buskirk.

Figure 1 of chapter III is two-thirds of a figure that was originally drawn on the Macintosh by Sue A. Carter for inclusion in our paper on the absorption of X-rays by aluminum. When we were writing that paper, Sean Fitzsimmons reminded us of the value of Marmier and Sheldon's book for the phenomenology of photon interactions with matter.

A number of sections dealing with X-ray generation, diffraction, and Mosely's work started life out as verbatim extracts from the instruction manual for the TELTRON Tel-X-Ometer apparatus, although they have since been revised.

Some of this material was written for the Intermediate Modern Physics course in the winter of 1979, and for the Medical Physics class in the spring of 1979, as isolated handouts which covered parts of what are now Chapters I, II, IV, V, VI, and VIII. The preparation of the successive versions of the manuscript was done with the H-11, using the H-19 video terminal with a modified form of David L. O'Connor's version of the TECO VT-52 screen editor. Mitzi Schowalter did much of the typing to enter the revisions and extensions into the H-11.

In the fall of 1982 these Notes were moved from the H-11 to Kalamazoo College's VAX-11/750, where they were further revised using EDT, TPU, and RUNOFF. In July and August, 1988, they were moved from the VAX to a Macintosh SE (and a succession of Macintosh systems since then), where they have been further revised with Wordperfect, Superpaint, and PhotoShop. Most of the old hand-drawn figures were scanned at 75 pixels/inch with the Apple Scanner using Applescan software, and then cleaned up with Superpaint. Some new figures have been created with Cricket Graph and modified with Superpaint, and others with Microsoft Excel and PhotoShop. Many of the equations have been re-written with MacEqn or Expressionist.

R.D.P.
12/4/03
Athens

Dick Piccard revised this file ( https://people.ohio.edu/piccard/radnotes/credits.html ) on December 4, 2003.

Please E-mail comments or suggestions to piccard@ohio.edu .