Ronald Wilfred (or Wilfrid) Gurney (1898, in

Cheltenham Cheltenham (), also known as Cheltenham Spa, is a spa town and borough on the edge of the Cotswolds in the county of Gloucestershire, England. Cheltenham became known as a health and holiday spa town resort, following the discovery of mineral s ...

,''Proc. R. Soc. Lond.'' A 371, 56-66 (1980) "Memories of early days in solid state physics", N F Mott FRS, Accessed 7 April 2010
/ref> England – 14 April 1953, in New York, New York)Bristol (University) Physics in the 1930s, Sir Neville Mott, Melville Wills Chair of Theoretical Physics, Bristol University 1933-ca.1953
/ref> was a British

theoretical physicist Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experimen ...

and research pupil of

William Lawrence Bragg Sir William Lawrence Bragg, (31 March 1890 – 1 July 1971) was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer (1912) of Bragg's law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structu ...

at the

Victoria University of Manchester The Victoria University of Manchester, usually referred to as simply the University of Manchester, was a university in Manchester, England. It was founded in 1851 as Owens College. In 1880, the college joined the federal Victoria University. Afte ...

during the 1920s and 1930s,

Bristol University , mottoeng = earningpromotes one's innate power (from Horace, ''Ode 4.4'') , established = 1595 – Merchant Venturers School1876 – University College, Bristol1909 – received royal charter , type ...

during the 1930s and later in the US, where he died.

Radioactive decay processes

Whilst at the Palmer Physical Laboratory at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

from 1926 to 1928, he discovered

alpha decay Alpha decay or α-decay is a type of radioactive decay in which an atomic nucleus emits an alpha particle (helium nucleus) and thereby transforms or 'decays' into a different atomic nucleus, with a mass number that is reduced by four and an atom ...

via

quantum tunnelling Quantum tunnelling, also known as tunneling ( US) is a quantum mechanical phenomenon whereby a wavefunction can propagate through a potential barrier. The transmission through the barrier can be finite and depends exponentially on the barrier h ...

, together with

Edward Condon Edward Uhler Condon (March 2, 1902 – March 26, 1974) was an American nuclear physicist, a pioneer in quantum mechanics, and a participant during World War II in the development of radar and, very briefly, of nuclear weapons as part of the ...

and independently of

George Gamow George Gamow (March 4, 1904 – August 19, 1968), born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov ( uk, Георгій Антонович Гамов, russian: Георгий Антонович Гамов), was a Russian-born Soviet and American polymath, theoreti ...

. In the early 1900s, radioactive materials were known to have characteristic

exponential decay A quantity is subject to exponential decay if it decreases at a rate proportional to its current value. Symbolically, this process can be expressed by the following differential equation, where is the quantity and (lambda) is a positive rate ...

rates or half lives. At the same time, radiation emissions were known to have certain characteristic energies. By 1928, Gamow had solved the theory of the

of a nucleus via quantum tunnelling and the problem was also solved independently by Gurney and Condon.

Books

*''Elementary quantum mechanics'', Cambridge

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The University Press, 1934.
''Introduction to statistical mechanics''
New York, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1949. *''Electronic Processes in Ionic Crystals'' (1940, physics; with N.F. Mott)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gurney, Ronald Wilfried 1898 births 1953 deaths Academics of the University of Bristol Alumni of the Victoria University of Manchester British nuclear physicists British physicists

Radioactive decay processes

Books

See also

References