Rutherford scattering experiments
Comparison to JJ Thomson's results

At the time of Rutherford's paper, JJ Thomson was the "undisputed world master in the design of atoms". Rutherford needed to compare his new approach to Thomson's. Thomson's model, presented in 1910, modeled the electron collisions with hyperbolic orbits from his 1906 paper combined with a factor for the positive sphere. Multiple resulting small deflections compounded using a random walk.

In his paper Rutherford emphasized that single scattering alone could account for Thomson's results if the positive charge were concentrated in the center.Rutherford computes the probability of single scattering from a compact charge and demonstrates that it is 3 times larger than Thomson's multiple scattering probability. Rutherford completes his analysis including the effects of density and foil thickness, then concludes that thin foils are governed by single scattering, not multiple scattering.

Later analysis showed Thomson's scattering model could not account for large scattering.The maximum angular deflection from electron scattering or from the positive sphere each come to less than 0.02°; even many such scattering events compounded would result in less than a one degree average deflection and a probability of scattering through 90° of less than one in 10.
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