Flexi Says: In 1930, German researchers bombarded the element beryllium with alpha particles (helium nuclei containing two protons and two neutrons with a charge of +2). The particles produced in this process had strong penetrating power, which suggested they were fairly large. In addition, they were not affected by a magnetic field, so they were electrically neutral.
The English physicist James Chadwick (1891-1974) repeated these experiments and studied the energy of these particles. By measuring velocities, he was able to show that the new particle has essentially the same mass as a proton. So we now have a third subatomic particle with a mass equal to that of a proton, but with no charge. This particle is called the neutron. Chadwick won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1935 for his research.
