Related papers: Revisiting Taylor and the Trinity Test

This article is set during the 1944 and 1945 final push to complete Project Y -- the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos -- and focuses primarily on overcoming the challenge of creating and demonstrating a successful convergent explosive…

On July 16, 1945, the Trinity nuclear test exploded in the desert near Alamogordo, NM. A variety of new diagnostic experiments were fielded in an effort to understand the detailed performance of the nuclear device. This article describes a…

Images of an explosion can be used to study some of its physical properties. After reviewing the key aspects of the method originally developed to study the first nuclear detonation and analyzing the Trinity blast data, the method is…

The Trinity test of July 16, 1945 marked the scientific apex of the Manhattan Project. Often recognized as the symbolic birth of the nuclear age, Trinity's multifaceted legacy remains just as captivating and complex as it did 75 years ago.…

New measurement and assessment techniques have been applied to the radiochemical re-evaluation of the Trinity Event. Thirteen trinitite samples were dissolved and analyzed using a combination of traditional decay counting methods and the…

Enrico Fermi estimated the yield of the Trinity test to be about 10 kilotons by dropping small pieces of paper and observing their motion in the blast wave. This is about 40% of the radiochemically derived value of $25 \pm 2$ kilotons that…

One hundred and one atmospheric nuclear weapon tests were conducted between 1945 and 1962 in the United States, resulting in widespread dispersion of radioactive fallout, and leading to environmental contamination and population exposures.…

The September 11 terrorist attack against America has caused a lot of concern to the American public and the entire world, which is suspecting a new attack sooner or later. The most frightening scenario is the one involving the detonation…

During the Manhattan project a simple formula was developed by Bethe and Feynman in 1943 to estimate the yield of a fission-only nuclear explosion of a uniformly-dense bare-sphere of supercritical fissile material. We have not found any…

The idea of atoms is old but X-rays provided the first probe into the physical atom. Photographs of X-ray scattering from crystals -Laue spots- were the first visual proof for the physical existence of atoms arranged in a perfect geometric…

The Christy Gadget is the informal name for the plutonium device detonated in the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. In September 1944, Robert Christy, working in the theoretical implosion group, proposed a novel concept that altered the design…

Nuclear physics advances in the US and Britain, from 1939-1945, are described. The Manhattan Project's work led to an explosion in our knowledge of nuclear science. A conference in April 1943 at Los Alamos provided a simple formula used to…

Atomic nuclei are quantum many-body systems of protons and neutrons held together by strong nuclear forces. Under the proper conditions, nuclei can break into two (sometimes three) fragments which will subsequently decay by emitting…

A concise point kinetic model of the explosion of a prompt supercritical sphere driven by a nuclear fission chain reaction is presented. The findings are in good agreement with the data available for Trinity, the first detonation of a…

This article addresses shortcomings in the existing secondary literature describing the nature and involvement of computing at the World War II Los Alamos Lab. Utilizing rarely used source materials, and identifying points of bias among…

The Rutherford scattering experiment, conceived by Ernest Rutherford and carried out by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, provided the first direct evidence of a compact atomic nucleus, fundamentally altering the understanding of atomic…

The atomic bomb American program known as Manhattan Project has been studied in detail. Historians argue that the beginning of this program is rooted in the letter Einstein sent to American President Roosevelt in the summer of 1939. This…

We present quantitative measurements on a classic experiment proposed for the first time in 1947 to illustrate the phenomenon of a chain reaction in nuclear fission. The experiment involves a number of mousetraps loaded with solid balls.…

A complete history of early atomic models would fill volumes, but a reasonably coherent tale of the path from mechanical atoms to the quantum can be told by focusing on the relevant work of three great contributors to atomic physics, in the…

Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard worked together at Columbia in 1939-40, just after nuclear fission was discovered, to ascertain the feasibility of a nuclear chain reaction, and then on the construction of the first nuclear reactor. Szilard…