Ernest Lawrence a scrap of a paper napkin. While sitting in the library one evening in 1929, Lawrence glanced over a journal article by Rolf Widerøe, and was intrigued by one of the diagrams. This depicted a device that produced high-energy particles by means of a succession of small "pushes". The device depicted was laid out in a straight line using increasingly longer electrodes. At the time, physicists were beginning to explore the atomic nucleus. In 1919, the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford had fired alpha particles into nitrogen and had succeeded in knocking protons out of some of the nuclei. But
Americium-241 starting material for the production of other transuranic elements and transactinides – for example, neutron bombardment of Am yields Am: formula_3 From there, 82.7% of Am decays to Cm and 17.3% to Pu: 82.7% → formula_10 17.3%→ formula_11 In the nuclear reactor, Am is also up-converted by neutron capture to Am and Am, which transforms by β-decay to Cm: Irradiation of Am by C or Ne ions yields the isotopes Es (einsteinium) or Db (dubnium), respectively. Furthermore, the element berkelium (Bk isotope) had been first intentionally produced and identified by bombarding Am with alpha particles, in 1949, by the same