On the Interaction Between Neutrons and Electrons

[ Lancaster, PA ]: The Physical Review, 1947. First Edition. Wraps. Near Fine. First Edition. 1139-1146 pages. 7 3/4 x 10 1/2 inches (8vo). Original green printed wrappers. Offprint from The Physical Review, Vol 72, No 12, pp. 1139-1146, December 15, 1947. A touch of fading to the edges, otherwise a fine copy. Wraps. The Nobel Prize in Physics 1938 was awarded to Enrico Fermi "for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons". (Nobel site)

"The possible existence of a potential interaction between neutron and electron has been investigated by examining the asymmetry of thermal neutron scattering from xenon..." (abstract) "When the neutron experiments were at the end of their obvious and interesting extension, Leona Marshall and Fermi sat down and discussed the various possible neutron interactions. Mrs. Marshall recalls that her suggestion and urging led to the experiment on neutron-electron interaction (in xenon gas) described in this paper. The result was negative, but with a limit of error smaller than the magnitude of the effect which they estimated from meson theory. They were not aware of the interaction between the Pauli moment and the electric field of the electron, discovered only later by Foldy." (H. L. Anderson in the Collected Papers of Enrico Fermi Vol II).

"Leona Woods [Marshall] was 23 in 1942, the only woman present when Enrico Fermi's nuclear pile at the University of Chicago went critical and into the history books. She moved to Hanford in 1944 with her husband, fellow physicist John Marshall. Mrs. Libby was one of the few women scientists in the Manhattan Project and probably the most well known." (Voices of the Manhattan Project).