B Peters
Articles written in Proceedings – Section A
Volume 36 Issue 2 August 1952 pp 75-96
Production and interaction of mesons at very high energies
D Lal Yash Pal B Peters M S Swami
A shower containing ∼360 charged and neutral shower particles produced by a magnesium nucleus of 2×1014e.v. provides a source of mesons whose interactions have been studied over an aggregate track length of about 3 meters in emulsion. It is first shown that in very large showers not only the incident energy can be determined but also the energy of the shower particles. The angular distribution of the shower particles agrees closely and their multiplicity is consistent with Fermi’s theory.
It is shown that the interaction cross-section of charged shower particles is geometric and that at an energy ∈ ∼ 1000
The charged mesons are
Charged shower particles as well as electrons produce electron-positron pairs with a cross-section of the order of that predicted by theory.
The number of neutral mesons decaying into
There exists evidence for the emission of neutral particles, different from neutrons, capable of producing meson showers.
The energy balance of the event suggests that a few shower particles carry an appreciable fraction of the total energy.
Volume 38 Issue 4 October 1953 pp 277-287
A method is described for constructing out of individual sheets of nuclear emulsion a detector of large volume and stopping power which can be used for observing entire chains of successive nuclear interaction and decay processes initiated by high energy particles.
Such a detector which had been exposed for several hours in the stratosphere has proved particularly valuable for detecting K-mesons and Hypersons* and for studying their modes of production and decay.
Volume 38 Issue 5 November 1953 pp 398-417
Observations on
In an emulsion block detector1 exposed in the stratosphere three cases of the production of
Volume 38 Issue 5 November 1953 pp 418-439
A new method is developed for determining the mass of particles coming to rest in nuclear emulsions. Multiple coulomb scattering is measured with cells whose lengths vary along the trajectory in such a manner as to compensate for the momentum loss of the particle and keep the mean deviation between adjacent cells constant over the entire track. It is shown that this procedure is more convenient and inherently more accurate than that based on scattering measurements with constant cellsize. The method has been applied to
Volume 39 Issue 4 April 1954 pp 214-214 Erratum
Volume 40 Issue 4 October 1954 pp 151-157
On the construction of large nuclear emulsion block detectors
Volume 40 Issue 6 December 1954 pp 230-248
The flux of primary cosmic ray nuclei of atomic number
The method of determining the primary flux of nuclei with atomic number Z⩾3 developed by Bradt and Peters, has been extended to include all nuclei of charge Z⩾2. It is shown that the method permits the identification of primary helium nuclei with an efficiency
Volume 41 Issue 2 February 1955 pp 45-48
Volume 41 Issue 2 February 1955 pp 67-71
Radioactive beryllium in the atmosphere and on the earth
It is estimated that about 1,000 nuclei of radioactive Be10 (2·7 million years half-life) are produced per square meter per second by cosmic ray induced nuclear disintegrations in the atmosphere. The conditions for observing the resulting activity in rain water and in various regions on the earth are favourable and may be useful for measuring sedimentation rates and other geological surface changes during the Tertiary.
Volume 41 Issue 4 April 1955 pp 154-184
Small local dislocations in processed emulsions give rise to spurious scattering whose effect on tracks is indistinguishable from the multiple scattering produced by coulomb interaction. Because of this effect the atomic number of fast primary cosmic ray nuclei will be underestimated in more than 50% of the cases in experiments where multiple scattering of tracks and ionization measurements are employed for charge determination. The spurious scattering was investigated by measuring the track contours of 100 very long tracks due to energetic primary particles; the effect was present in comparable strength in all plates and all types of emulsions which have been investigated. It is too small to affect measurements on medium energy particle tracks (protons with energy below 600 MeV and heavy nuclei with energy below 300 MeV/ nucleon). It dominates, however, other sources or error and noise for tracks of energetic particles although it does not preclude occasional observations of very low scattering values. New methods for measuring various forms of noise have also been developed in the course of this work and the noise level for scattering measurements has been reduced below previously accepted values.
Spurious scattering is presumably largely responsible for the discrepancies which appear when one compares the primary charge and energy spectra derived from experiments involving scattering measurements with the corresponding spectra derived from numerous other experiments which employ different techniques.
If the experiments based on scattering measurements are omitted, the remaining evidence strongly favours a spectrum in which the energy per nucleon is nearly independent of atomic number for all primaries. It also favours a charge distribution which has a pronounced minimum for charges 3≤ Z≤ 5 and, therefore, yields a fairly low upper limit for the amount of interstellar matter traversed by primary cosmic ray nuclei.
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