Pierre Auger – Lise Meitner: Comparative contributions to the Auger effect

Abstract

It has been claimed by R. Sietmann that the attribution of the discovery of the so-called 'Auger' effect to Pierre Auger was a false attribution and that Lise Meitner should have got the credit for that discovery. However Sietmann himself recognised that Meitner's description of this effect was 'buried in' two larger papers whose primary concern was nuclear physics. Sietmann only mentioned Auger's 1925 article and did not mention his 1923 article, an omission now found in many places. We examine again L. Meitner's and P. Auger's contributions to the description of the 'Auger' effect. Meitner's concern was the exact nature of the (nuclear) beta radiations about which she opposed Ch. D. Ellis, and this had been the subject of an intense Berlin-Cambridge controversy where Ellis' description eventually prevailed. Auger's observations were the central theme of his PhD thesis at the J. Perrin's laboratory on the composed photoelectric effect. We thus believe that while L. Meitner should have shared the Nobel Prize with O. Hahn, the Auger effect has rightly been attributed to Auger.

Full text

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Olivier Hardouin Duparc
LSI, École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France
Pierre Auger – Lise Meitner:
Comparative contributions to the Auger effect
It has been claimed by R. Sietmann that the attribution of
the discovery of the so-called ‘Auger’ effect to Pierre
Auger was a false attribution and that Lise Meitner should
have got the credit for that discovery. However Sietmann
himself recognised that Meitner’s description of this effect
was ‘buried in’ two larger papers whose primary concern
was nuclear physics. Sietmann only mentioned Auger’s
1925 article and did not mention his 1923 article, an omis-
sion now found in many places. We examine again L. Meit-
ner’s and P. Auger’s contributions to the description of the
‘Auger’ effect. Meitner’s concern was the exact nature of
the (nuclear) beta radiations about which she opposed
Ch. D. Ellis, and this had been the subject of an intense Ber-
lin–Cambridge controversy where Ellis’ description even-
tually prevailed. Auger’s observations were the central
theme of his PhD thesis at the J. Perrin’s laboratory on the
composed photoelectric effect. We thus believe that while
L. Meitner should have shared the Nobel Prize with
O. Hahn, the Auger effect has rightly been attributed to
Auger.
Keywords: History of Sciences; Auger Effect; Nuclear
beta decay; Secondary electronic emission in solids
1. Introduction
AES is a well-known acronym for all surface scientists and
stands for Auger Electron Spectroscopy. It is one of the
most commonly employed surface analytical techniques
for determining the composition of the surface layers of
materials, and a large amount of research on surfaces and
interfaces has been performed using AES in the last three
or four decennia. Pierre Auger is a French physicist also
well-known for his contributions to cosmic ray physics.
Twenty years ago, however, it has been claimed by Richard
Sietman that “Lise Meitner [was] the person who really
should have taken the credits for discovering the so-called
‘Auger’ effect” and the freelance author explained the
background in a two-page article [1]. Favourably impressed
by the idea of doing justice to someone who, “as a woman
in the male dominated world of physics, was an outsider,”
I enthusiastically shared the news with Siegfried Hofmann,
a respected German specialist of AES, who expressed some
skepticism. I thus decided to re-examine the background by
myself, and found a background even more complicated
than I first thought.
The present paper is organised as follows: Lise Meitner’s
contributions, within the context of the so-called b-ray
controversy with the Briton Charles Drumond Ellis, then
Pierre Auger’s contribution, in the context of his PhD the-
sis, then the developing recognition of the effect, first in
Germany then worldwide. Conclusions are eventually
drawn.
2. Lise Meitner, and Charles Drumond Ellis
Several good books have been written on Lise Meitner [2–
4]. Born in 1878, she went to Berlin in 1907 to study with
Max Planck and started her research work with Otto Hahn
on the radioactivity of the b-ray emitters, in a woodshop at
the Chemical Institute of the Berlin University. Other teams
naturally tried to do the same and, mainly due to the
subtlety of these b-rays, divergences soon arose. This fasci-
O. H. Duparc: Pierre Auger – Lise Meitner: Comparative contributions to the Auger effect
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nating and complex story has already been described [5 –8],
beautifully at length by Carl Jensten [7]. I shall sum up the
matter here, the beginning and the end, and develop the part
about the so-called internal conversions (of whi ch the
Auger effects are now the most useful examples), which
needs to be put into context.
Inspired by the apparently quite reasonable idea of a sim-
ple analogy a-rays and b-rays, Lise Meitner, with Otto
Hahn, first thought they had demonstrated that b-rays were
purely mono-energetic by using a magnetic spectrometer
and photographic plates. In 1913, however, James Chad-
wick (1891 –1974) showed, using Geiger point counters in-
stead of photographic plates, that b-particles have a range
of energies, with a continuous spectrum (up to a maximum
energy) rather than just a set of discrete lines (J. Chadwick
had been recommended by Ernest Rutherford – Manchester
– to work with Hans Wilhelm Geiger in his Radioactivity
Laboratory at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt
in Berlin-Charlottenburg – Geiger had previously been
Rutherford’s assistant in Manchester. There were very pri-
vileged relations between Germany and Great Britain be-
fore World War I, see [9]). Research on b-rays went on after
1918, with Lise Meitner in Berlin, and with Rutherford’s
group in Cambridge. The beginning 1920’s saw the rise of
the so-called b-ray controversy, with bitter exchanges in
1922. Charles Drumond Ellis (1895–1980), who was
Rutherford’s student, pragmatically wrote that while the
discrete b-lines could more or less be exp lained by the ac-
tion of internal (nuclear) c-rays on the orbital electrons
(i.e. some internal photoelectric effect), the continuous b-
spectrum certainly was of nuclear origin, with a continuous
distribution probably from the start, once they leave the nu-
cleus, even if he had no theory to explain it. Meitner tried to
save her original assumption of mo nochromatic nuclear b-
rays, and, while she successfully attributed the discrete b-
lines to various internal effects, including the now called
Auger effect, she dev eloped the rather ad hoc idea that the
continuous b-spectrum was to be explained by some per-
turbing effects on the purely monochromatic primary (nu-
clear) b-rays.
Let us be more precise about the discrete b-lines. Ellis
had for the first time in 1921 proposed some mechanism to
explain the b-ray discrete line spectrum [10]. He attributed
this mechanism to his mentor Rutherford (Nobel Prize
1908, knighted 1914): “According to his view the primary
phenomenon is the emission of a b-particle from the
nucleus. It may happen, through some mechanism at pres-
ent unknown, that this b-particle gives rise to a c-ray. This
c-ray in traversing the electronic system of the atom may
be absorbed and eject a high speed electron. It is these last
electrons which constitute the b-ray line spectrum.” And
more explicitly again in 1922 [11]: “Sir Ernest Rutherford
has shown that the lines in the b-ray spectrum were due in
some way to the conversion of monochromatic c-rays in
the same radio-active atom that emitted them.” This was
clearly stated but not clearly substantiated (‘in some
way’). Meitner developed apparently similar ideas in two
articles published in 1922 to explain the discrete b lin es
[12, 13]. In the second article she even went a little further:
“A primary (nuclear-) b-ray turns itself into a c-ray in the
nucleus. The c-ray either goes through unchanged, or ejects
secondary b-rays from the electron shells. The characteris-
tic Röntgen-ray [X-ray] of the atom is thus excited. It, in
turn, can of course eject again electrons, from lower energy
levels.” She described the process with more details in a
1923 article, received in June [14] , where she wrote: “The
primary b-rays eject K-electrons, thus exciting the K
a
-ra-
diation, which in turn disperses L-, M- or N-electrons, the
whole process, from the emission of the primary b-ray re-
lated to the nucleus disintegration to the dispersion of an
L-, M-, or N-electron, occuring within the same atom.”
She further insisted that the whole story must occur within
the same atom, and not with neighbouring atoms. The ex-
pression “in the same atom” explicitly appeared in Ellis
1922 and in Meitner 1923 where it was connected to some
conceptual (and even somewhat handwaving by today’s
standards) argument developed by Svein Rosseland on the
possibility of internal conversion [15].
One does of course recognize a primitive description of
what is now known as the Auger effect. Most unfortunately
however, Meitner’s articles are actually more concerned
with the determination of the characteristics of the primary,
(nuclear-) b-rays, than with the characteristics of the sec-
ondary (shell-) b-rays. Reading the articles from both sides,
one deeply feels a strong opposition between her and Ellis.
Although they kept on improving the accuracy of their
apparatus, with magnetic spectrometers and Geiger coun-
ters, the two teams would not change their mind on the in-
terpretation of the continuous part of the spectrum [4 –8].
Only the use of some detector based on an entirely different
principle could perhaps help to convince one of the two
teams, one way or another. (The use of Geiger point coun-
ters by Chadwick had helped to reveal the deceptive effects
of the photographic plate technique previously used). Ellis
thus thought of using a calorimeter thick enough to measure
the total amount of energy released by the nuclear electrons
emitted by a radioactive source. Practical problems of accu-
racy were enormous and it took two years to Ellis and
Wooster to achieve this experiment (1925 –1927). It cor-
roborated Ellis’ contention that the nuclear electrons are in-
deed emitted with continu ously varying energies the way
the continuous spectrum shows it. Meitner still argued
about the estimation of the possible energy loss via the c-
rays (and Wolfgang Pauli, in a letter to Ehrenfest in May
1929, even wrote that the Ellis–Wooster experiment was
completely harmless). Meitner repeated the experiment in
Berlin with a student of her and an improved calorimeter
and confirmed Ellis and Wooster’s result. This time Meit-
ner gave up and just said that she could absolutely not un-
derstand the results. The Ellis and Wooster’s calorimeter
experiment thus proved to be crucial, even if it just turned
out to be consistent with the spectrum analysis (and no
new theory was simultaneously proposed. It took a few
more years, and some desperately wild ideas, to find the so-
lution of that conundrum: the actual nuclear b-reaction is
neutron ! proton + electron + antineutrino, and (anti)neu-
trinos, although they do carry out energy, are very difficult
to detect – only in 1956).
Thus, in a way, on Lise Meitner’s side as a nuclear ex-
perimental physicist, she had gone wrong on the nature of
the nuclear b -rays, and she certainly felt frustrated about it
even if she got several rewards in these years (to only men-
tion the University of Berlin, she had got a Dozentur (uni-
versity lectureship) position in 1922 and became Nicht-
beamteter Außero rdentlicher Professor in 1926, which
roughly translates to “unofficial, extraordinary Professor”,
O. H. Duparc: Pierre Auger – Lise Meitner: Comparative contributions to the Auger effect
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some way to bypass the administration rigidity. The mathe-
matician Amalie (Emmy) Noether had already got a similar
title in 1922 at the University of Göttingen. Lise Meitner
was a paid Professor in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut (KWI)
since 1919).
3. Pierre Auger
Born in 1899, Pierre Victor Auger entered the École Nor-
male Supérieure in Paris in 1919 in a biology group but
with interest in atomic physics [16,17]. During his last years
as a graduate student, when getting ready for the final com-
petition called the “Agrégation” he had to perform some la-
boratory work. This was in 1922 and he had been fascinated
by the cloud chamber pictures published by C.T.R. Wilson
a few years earl ier, featuring the tracks of otherwise invisi-
ble alpha particles and of photo-electrons. He decided, with
his best friend at the École, Francis Perrin, to build the first
cloud chamber “made in France” and they succeeded in
producing some reasonably accurate alpha particle tracks.
He wanted to go on with the cloud chamber and having got
a fellowship he stayed in the laboratory of Professor Jean
Perrin, in the old Sorbonne, and started work towards the
production of a doctoral thesis. His intention was to try to
visualize the whole story of an atomic photoexcitation:
first, the production of a photoelectron, then the consequent
emission of a radiation quantum, and the absorption of this
quantum, with produ ction of another photoelectron all in
the same cloud chamber.
Although first proposed in 1911, it was not until 1923
that the cloud chamber was brought to a reasonable state
of perfection. To quote C.T.R. (Charles Thomas Rees) Wil-
son himself almost verbatim in 1923 [18], the ionising rays
are made to pass through moist air, or other gas, in which
the water-vapour has been brought into the super-saturated
state by sudden expansion of the gas. Each ion liberated be-
comes at once the nucleus for the condensation of a visible
droplet of water; the clouds of drops thus formed are imme-
diately photographed. Very sharply defined pictures of the
tracks of ionising particles may be obt ained in this way.
This of course demanded a lot of skillfulness because many
conditions needed to be suitably arranged so that the photo-
graphs of the paths of the ionising particles could be consid-
ered as genuine and free from instrumental distortion.
I now quote P. Auger in his first article communicated at
the French Academy of Sciences in July 1923 [1 9]: “When
the first [atomic] electron leaves [the atom, ejected by an in-
cident X-ray], as a secondary b-ray, there is a vacancy left
in the electronic system of the excited atom. The drop of a
more peripheral electron on that level is accompanied by
the emission of a characteristic radiation quantum. This
quantum may be absorbed in the atom itself, and produce,
at the expense of the peripheral levels [the outer electronic
shells], a tertiary b-ray (. ..). The repetition of that process
must lead to the production of a fourth order ray; and I in-
deed believe I have observed such rays in the case of [gas-
eous] iodine.”
P. Auger kept on publishing several times on that subject
– although only in French [20– 23] – since it has been the
subject of his three year thesis the manuscript of which ap-
peared as a seventy-one page article (+ 18 figures) in the
French Annales de Physique in 1926 [22]. The same year,
his laboratory supervisor Jean Perrin got the Nobel prize
and his sister Col ette married Francis Perrin, Jean’s son.
Pierre Auger clearly mastered the different aspects, experi-
mental as well as theoretical, of what he called the com-
posed photoelectric effect. In his synthesis he drew compar-
isons with other works, Wilson, Barkla, Maurice de Broglie
(Louis’ elder brother), Holweck, Ellis, Meitner, Klein and
Rosseland, never in a polemical way. For instance he just
said that Barkla’s observations could be simply interpreted
and did not insist on the fact that Barkla had used them to
imply that the Einsteinian quantum of rad iation, in the
sense of an indivisible bundle of radiant energy, does not
exist.
4. Recognition
In a review she wrote on nuclear structure in 1926 for the
XXII
nd
volume of the famous Hans Geiger and Karl Scheel
“Handbuch der Physik” series, Lise Meitner, on the matter
of internal absorption, i.e. absorption of a b-orac-ray in
the very atom which emitted that ray, cited herself [14],
Rosseland [15], Wilson [18] and Auger [20]. In the next
volume of the same series, published the same year, Walter
Bothe, who had just defended his thesis entitled ‘Über den
Elementarprozess der photoelektrischen Elektronenauslö-
sung’ wrote a long chapter on the emission and diffusion
of X-rays [25] where he cited Rosseland [15], Meitner [14]
and Auger [20–22]. The following year, Gregor Wentzel,
just named extraordinary professor of mathematical physics
at the Leipzig university, mentioned that Auger had ob-
served in a cloud chamber photoelectric effects with emis-
sion of a second electron, and spoke of Auger-Elektronen
[26]. Still in 1927, but in the U.K., two experimentalists
measuring cathode ray lines, Harold Roper Robinson and
A.M. Cassie wrote that the most direct evidence of the fre-
quency of internal absorption is that deduced by Auger
from examination of the Wilson tracks produced by homo-
O. H. Duparc: Pierre Auger – Lise Meitner: Comparative contributions to the Auger effect
1164 Int. J. Mat. Res. (for merly Z. Metallkd.) 100 (2009) 9
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Fig. 1. Pierre Victor Auger. Courtesy of the French Academy of
Sciences – Institut de France.

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geneous X-rays in heavy gases [27]. They also mentioned
the general summary given by Bothe. In 1931, Hartmut
Kallmann and Boris Rosen, from the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Insti-
tut (KWI) für Chemie und Elektrochemie (Meitner was at
the KWI für Chemie) , spoke of Auger-Prozesse in a review
article on elementary ionisation processes and their article
got simultaneously translated in Russian [28]. In 1933,
when she wrote the second version of her review chapter
on nuclear structure for the Geiger–Scheel series, Lise
Meitner, in the Innere Absorption section, simply added a
sentence saying that one designates such occurences as
“Rosseland–Augereffekt” [29]. In 1935, the Australian
physicist Eric Henry Stoneley Burhop wrote a 13-page arti-
cle entitled “The Auger Effect”, in the Proceedings of the
Royal Society of London [30].
Then came into play engineers and physicists concerned
with electronic devices and secondary electron emission in
solids. They used solid-state physics concepts and it worked
rather well, see [31], at least apparently until 1950, when
one could read in a short letter to the Editor published in
Phys. Rev.: “Present theories of secondary emission are
based on the Fermi gas or Bloch model of a metal. (.. .)
The simple correlation of [the maximum value of the true
secondary electron yield of an element] with [its] position
in the periodic system would seem to indicate that a satis-
factory theory of secondary emission must take into ac-
count atomic electrons more firmly bound than the valence
or conduction electrons in a metal” [32]. James Joseph
Lander was to solve the difficulty two years later at the Bell
Telephone Laboratories, in an article the title of which ex-
plicitly invoked Auger electrons: Auger Peaks in the En-
ergy Spectra of Secondary Electrons from Various Materi-
als [33]. J.J. Lander simultaneously developed an electron
gun generating a beam of low-velocity electrons of high
quality and stability. It provided a very interesting and reli-
able technique for surface analysis. Surface Auger Electron
Spectroscopy rocketed and Auger only had to write down
his recollections, in English that time, in 1975 in a Surface
Science issue [17].
5. Conclusions
Apart for her numerous wonderful achievements, with Otto
Hahn and later on, Lise Meitner had gone wrong on a fun-
damental aspect of the nuclear b-ray story and she probably
kept some frustration about it, as she was a nuclear physi-
cist at heart, and not an atomic physicist. She may also have
thought that on the theoretical side, Svein Rossel and had
provided some fundamenta l concept, whereas on the ex-
perimental side, Pierre Auger had “seen” the multiple elec-
tron events, at least their tracks, perfectly understanding
and analysing what he was seeing. Indeed Pierre Auger
proved most successful in his thesis work. Although he only
published in French papers at that time – but it was not in a
war time – it probably explains why atomic physicists and
chemists adopted the appellation of Auger effect, Auger
electrons, Auger peaks. In the meantime Pierre Auger used
the cloud chambers to detect cosmic rays and he is also
known for the Auger showers which he first discovered
not far from the Panthéon in Paris. He also was an excellent
professor and got involved in the administration of French
universities and the administration of research at the French
as well as at the international level. Last but not least, he
sculpted, bronzes, wr ote a book on the philosophy of phy-
sics and biology – The microscopic Man. An Essay in Mon-
adism [33] – and also wrote some poems. He died at the age
of 94 in 1993. Lise Meitner had died at the age of 90, in
1968.
I wish to thank the library department of the École Polytechnique.
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O. H. Duparc: Pierre Auger – Lise Meitner: Comparative contributions to the Auger effect
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(Received September 2, 2008; accepted October 27, 2008)
Bibliography
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O. Hardouin Duparc
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Appendices
A. Original texts
Lise Meitner 1922 [12], p. 147:
Ein primärer (Kern-) b-Strahl verwandelt sich im Kern in
einen c-Strahl. Der c-Strahl geht entweder unverändert als
c-Strahl durch, oder wirft aus den Elektronenringen sekun-
däre b-Strahlen heraus. Dadurch wird aber die charakteris-
tische Röntgenstrahlung des Atoms angeregt, die natürlich
auch ihrerseits wieder Elektronen aus nied rigen Energie-
niveaus herauswerfen kann.
Lise Meitner 1923 [14], p. 61:
Die primären b-Strahlen werfen K-Elektronen hera us, da-
durch wird die K
a
-Strahlung angeregt, die ihrerseits wieder
L-, M- oder N-Elektronen auslöst, wobei sich der ganze
Vorgang von der mit dem Kernzerfall verknüpften Aussen-
dung des primären b-Strahls an bis zur Auslösung eines L-,
M- oder N-Elektrons im selben Atom abspielt.
Lise Meitner 1923 [14], p. 62:
(.. .) die von mir vertretene Meinung , daß die b-Strahlen
ebenso wie die a-Strahlen primär mit einer definierten für
den Kern charakteristischen Geschwindigkeit emittiert wer-
den. Daß die primären b-Strahlen ein etwas verwaschenes
(.. .) Band bilden, ist durch sekundär e Prozesse bedingt.
(.. .) Rosselan d geht auch von der Annahme aus, daß die
b-Strahlen beim Austritt aus dem Kern eine ganz bestimmte
Geschwindigkeit besitzen.
Pierre Auger 1923 [19], p. 171:
Lors du départ du premier électron, sous forme du rayon b
secondaire, une place est laissée libre dans le système élec-
tronique de l’atome excité. La chute d’un électron plus péri-
phérique sur ce niveau s’accompagne de l’émission d’un
quantum de rayonnement caractéristique. Ce quantum peut
être absorbé dans l’atome même, et servir à la production,
aux dépens des niveaux périphériques, d’un rayon b ter-
tiaire: les caractéristiques de ce rayon seront alors celles
qui ont été décrites précédemment. La répétition du même
processus doit aboutir à la production d’un rayon quater-
naire; et je crois en effet avoir observé de tels rayons dans
le cas de l’iode.
Lise Meitner 1933 [29], p. 150:
Man bezeichnet daher diese Erscheinung eines strahlung-
slosen Übergangs mit gleichzeitiger Emission eines Elek-
trons als Rosseland–Augereffekt.
B. Real, and not real photons
The actual quantum mechanical picture is somewhat more
subtle: when a peripheral electron falls down into an inner
vacancy, this may either i) emit a real X-ray, characteristic
of the atom, and leading to X-Ray fluorescence, or ii) in-
duce the emission out of the atom of another electron also
with an energy characteristic of the atom, leading to AES,
with an Auger yield complementary to the fluorescence
yield. The subtle point is that the second process does not
involve any real intermediate X-ray, contrary to what
Meitner’s, and Auger’s, simple picture implies. There are
indeed many instances where Auger electrons are ob-
served, corresponding to transitions which would be for-
bidden by the selection rules, were a real photon involved
in the process. Already in 1927, Robinson and Cassie
wrote [27]: “there is a general belief that the so-called “in-
ternal absorption” is not true absorption of an X-ray by an
atom in the usual sense, but rather the result of a “radia-
tionless” rearrangement of the electrons within the atomic
system.” For readers interested by a thourough and mod-
ern treatment, I refer to the very nice book by Dipankar
Chattarji: The Theory of Auger Transitions, Academic
Press, London, 1976.
O. H. Duparc: Pierre Auger – Lise Meitner: Comparative contributions to the Auger effect
1166 Int. J. Mat. Res. (for merly Z. Metallkd.) 100 (2009) 9
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