Cross section (geometry) of Earth at right. Cross-sections are often used in anatomy to illustrate the inner structure of an organ, as shown at left. A cross-section of a tree trunk, as shown at left, reveals growth rings that can be used to find the age of the tree and the temporal properties of its environment. Cross section (geometry) In geometry and science, a cross section is the non-empty intersection of a solid body in three-dimensional space with a plane, or the analog in higher-dimensional spaces. Cutting an object into slices creates many parallel cross sections. The boundary of a cross section in
Cross section (physics) to the sum of cross sections over all events. The differential cross section is extremely useful quantity in many fields of physics, as measuring it can reveal a great amount of information about the internal structure of the target particles. For example, the differential cross section of Rutherford scattering provided strong evidence for the existence of the atomic nucleus. Instead of the solid angle, the momentum transfer may be used as the independent variable of differential cross sections. Differential cross sections in inelastic scattering contain resonance peaks that indicate the creation of metastable states and contain information about their energy