The measurement of the intensity of an X-ray beam in absolute units is in theory most satisfactorily accomplished by a determination of its heating effect. The method, however, is attended by considerable experimental difficulties, so that its application is very limited, and in practice it is usual to replace it by a determination of the ionization produced when the beam is passed through a gas. To correlate the ionization with an absolute intensity requires a quantitative knowledge of the details of the interaction between the X-rays and the molecules concerned and of the ionization of the gas by the ejected electrons. It sometimes happens that the processes involved about which we know least are relatively unimportant, so that a fairly reliable correlation can be made; and much work has been done on the application of the ionization method to X-ray dosimetry. But in general a quantitative correlation between ionization and intensity is not possible. A further study of the ionization of gases by X-rays is therefore desirable; moreover it may be made to yield important information concerning the processes involved. The early development of the physics of X-rays contains many examples of this, and more recently an important contribution has been made by Stockmeyer. The events leading to the ionization of a heavy gas are exceedingly complicated, whereas in the light gases (hydrogen and helium) some of these events are absent or else occur to a negligible extent, so that the interpretation of experiments with the latter becomes simpler and more reliable. These gases are therefore specially worthy of study. Moreover, for them the application of quantum mechanics leads to the most definite results for comparison with experiment, and in particular permits of a direct test of some aspects of Dirac’s theory of recoil scattering. The ionization due to the gas itself is, however, very small, and may even be less than the secondary ionization due to electrons liberated from the chamber walls. The technique used in ionization measurements with heavy gases is therefore unsuitable. Hitherto the only attempt made to extend such measurements to light gases is an experiment carried out in 1915 on hydrogen by Shearer who, however, obtained very variable results and an ionization markedly
smaller
than that to be expected from recoil electrons alone. Moreover his experimental method is now open to criticism in view of our greater knowledge of X-rays, and in particular the fluorescent radiation used was of doubtful homogeneity. The present paper will describe a new technique suitable for quantitative measurements of the ionization produced by X-rays in light gases, and in another paper it will be applied to a re-investigation of hydrogen.
Electronic Excitations and Radiation Damage in Macromolecular Crystallography
