Page:Radio-activity.djvu/190

 proportional to it. Since the absorption of the α rays in gases is probably mainly due to the exhaustion of the energy of the rays by the production of ions in the gas, it seems probable that the absorption in metals is due to a similar cause.

102. Relation between ionization and absorption in gases. It has been shown (section 45) that if the α rays are completely absorbed in a gas, the total ionization produced is about the same for all the gases examined. Since the rays are unequally absorbed in different gases, there should be a direct connection between the relative ionization and the relative absorption. This is seen to be the case if the results of Strutt (section 45) are compared with the relative absorption constants (section 100).

Relative   Relative Gas       absorption  ionization Air               1           1 Hydrogen           ·27         ·226 Carbon dioxide    1·43        1·53

Considering the difficulty of obtaining accurate determinations of the absorption, the relative ionization in a gas is seen to be directly proportional to the relative absorption within the limits of experimental error. This result shows that the energy absorbed in producing an ion is about the same in air, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide.

103. Mechanism of the absorption of α rays by matter. The experiments, already described, show that the ionization of the gas, due to the α rays from a large plane surface of radio-active matter, falls off in most cases approximately according to an exponential law, until most of the rays are absorbed, whereupon the ionization decreases at a much faster rate. In the case of polonium, the ionization falls off more rapidly than is to be expected on the simple exponential law.

The ionization produced in the gas is due to the collision of the rapidly moving α particles with the molecules of the gas in their path. On account of its large mass, the α particle is a far more efficient ionizer than the β particle moving at the same speed. It can be deduced from the results of experiment that