6.4 Rutherford and discovery of the nucleus
Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand physicist working in England. To follow up on Thomson’s experiment, Rutherford carried out a simple but clever experiment to investigate the internal structure of the atom. Together with his assistant, Geiger and Marsden, Rutherford studied the scattering of alpha particle from gold foil. The result showed that an atom has a nucleus and helped Rutherford to propose a new model for a nuclear atom.