Millikan Oil Drop

In the early 20th century, it is known that the molecules are composed of the atoms and their constituent particles are proton, neutron and electron, although it was not widely accepted phenomenon. As the scientist community was not united on the existence of atoms and their constituent particle hence the associated parameters of these particles were unknown at that time. Several scientists conducted various experiment to establish the very existence of the particle by find the various parameters associated with these particles, like mass, charge, etc.. The initial experiment for finding the charge was conducted by Thomson, while he was working on the Roentgens x-rays experiment. He performed an experiment on the x-rays to find the discrepancy in the behaviour of the cathode rays under varying electric and magnetic fields. Although he was not able to establish the mass or the charge of the elementary particle but he was able to find the ratio of charge to mass (e/m). This ratio helps, to a large extent, Professor Millikan to find the charge of the electron in his path breaking experiment. His experiment was termed as Millikans Oil Drop Experiment.

Millikan's Oil Drop Experiment

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The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment is commonly known as Millikan experiment and was first performed by Robert Millikan and Harvey Fletcher in 1909. Robert Millikan was the professor of University of Chicago at that time. The experiment was performed by Professor Millikan with the useful inputs from Mr. Fletcher. In this experiment a charged oil drop was suspended vertically between the two electrodes. Then the electric field is applied to such an extent that the free fall of the oil drop, under the influence of gravitational pull, was stopped. With the known electric field and other parameters Millikan was succeeded to calculate the charge on the drop. He published his findings in 1913 and was awarded Nobel prize for physics in 1923 for his work on finding the charge of the electron.

Millikan Oil Drop Apparatus

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The design of the Millikans oil drop apparatus was very simple yet very powerful tool to find the charge on the particle. In the figure below the Millikan and Fletchers apparatus is shown.

As can be seen from the diagram, there are two chambers in the Millikans apparatus. The above chamber is used to spray the tiny droplet of the oil and the second chamber has empty space separated by the electrodes. The potential difference between these electrodes is in the range of thousands of volts so that the oil droplet could not free fall when subject to the electric field. The charge on the oil drop is produced by the interaction of the oil drop with the X ray. The X ray interacts with the free falling oil drop and give away its charge to the oil drop. The oil starts dropping under the influence of the uniform electric field between two electrodes but it stops midway. With the known electric field applied and other parameters it is easy to calculate the charge on the oil drop. The Millikan using this apparatus was able to find the electron charge as precious as 1.5924 10
19

Millikan Oil Drop Experiment Summary

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C, which is within 1% accuracy range of the modern corrected value of the electron (1.6 x 10

-19

C).

To understand the experiment of Millikans we would learn how he performed things one by one step taken by him: 1. Initially he uses an atomic sprayer to spray the tiny oil particle in the first chamber.

2. He lets these oil drop falls under the influence of the gravitational field, until they acquire the terminal velocity. 3. Using the terminal velocity as input he calculated the mass of the oil drop. 4. Next he illuminated the second chamber with the X rays and allowed the oil drop to fall freely. Due to the X rays the chamber is illuminated and the air gets ionized. This ionized air comes in contact with the oil drop. 5. The electron on the air particle attaches itself to the oil drop and hence now the oil drop is charged. 6. He then attached the battery to the two electrodes and apply the enough voltage to counter balance the force of gravity. 7. By using the value of the applied uniform electric field, he was able to estimate the charge associated the oil drop. 8. He then repeated the same experiment with different charge density and always finds that the charge of oil drop(s) obtained is the multiple of the 1.59 x 10
-19

C.
-19

9. He then concluded that the charge of the electron is equal to 1.59 x 10

C.

From the above explanation one question definitely comes to mind How the charge on the oil drop is calculated. So lets look at the force applied on the oil drop when it is charged and under the uniform electric field.

As shown in the figure the oil drop is falling under the influence of the gravity and hence the downward force is equal to

Fdown = m.g
Due to the application of the electric field the force exerted on the oil drop which counter balances the downward force is equal to

FCounter = q.E
Where; m = mass of the oil droplet;

g = acceleration due to the gravity;

q = charge on the droplet; and E = uniform electric field between electrodes.

Equating these two we have;

qE = mg q =mgE
with the mass of the oil drop known (by calculating the terminal velocity) we can find the value of the charge associated with the oil drop. Mass of the electron : Although the Millikans experiment is widely known to find the charge of the electron (or fundamental) particle, he also calculated the mass of the electron using the calculated charge and the charge to the mass ratio which was given by the Thomson using the cathode ray tube. The mass of the electron was calculated to be 9.1 x 10 g. So, with the single experiment Millikan was able to find both the mass as well as charge of the electron.
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Oil drop experiment

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Millikan's setup for the oil drop experiment

The oil drop experiment was an experiment performed by Robert Millikan and Harvey Fletcher in 1911 to measure the elementary electric charge (the charge of the electron). The experiment entailed balancing the downward gravitational force with the upward drag and electric forces on tiny charged droplets of oil suspended between two metal electrodes. Since the density of the oil was known, the droplets' masses, and therefore their gravitational and buoyant forces, could be determined from their observed radii. Using a known electric field, Millikan and Fletcher could determine even the charge on oil droplets in mechanical equilibrium. By repeating the experiment for many droplets, they confirmed that the charges were all multiples of some fundamental value, and calculated it to be 1.5924(17)1019 C, within 1% of the currently accepted value of 1.602176487(40)1019 C. They proposed that this was the charge of a single electron.

Contents
[hide]

1 Background 2 Experimental procedure o o 2.1 Apparatus 2.2 Method

3 Fraud allegations

4 Millikan's experiment as an example of psychological effects in scientific methodology 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

[edit]Background

Robert A. Millikan in 1891

Starting in 1900, while a professor at the University of Chicago, Millikan, with the significant input of Fletcher,[1] and after improving his setup, published his seminal study in 1913.[2] Millikan's experiment involved measuring the force on oil droplets in a glass chamber sandwiched between two electrodes, one above and one below. With the electrical field calculated, he could measure the droplet's charge, the charge on a single electron being (1.5921019 C). At the time of Millikan and Fletcher's oil drop experiments, the existence of subatomic particles was not universally accepted. Experimenting with cathode rays in 1897, J. J. Thomson had discovered negatively charged "corpuscles", as he called them, with a mass about 1840 times smaller than that of a hydrogen atom. Similar results had been found by George FitzGerald and Walter Kaufmann. Most of what was then known about electricity and magnetism, however, could be explained on the basis that charge is a continuous variable; in much the same way that many of the properties of light can be explained by treating it as a continuous wave rather than as a stream of photons. The so-called elementary charge e is one of the fundamental physical constants and its accurate value is of great importance. In 1923, Millikan won the Nobel Prize inphysics in part because of this experiment. Aside from the measurement, the beauty of the oil drop experiment is that it is a simple, elegant hands-on demonstration that charge is actually quantized. Thomas Edison, who had previously thought of charge as a continuous variable, became convinced after working with Millikan and Fletcher's apparatus. [3] This experiment has since been repeated by generations of physics students, although it is rather expensive and difficult to do properly.

In the last two decades, several computer-automated experiments have been conducted to search for isolated fractionally charged particles. So far (2007), no evidence for fractional charge particles was found over more than 100 million drops measured.[4]

[edit]Experimental [edit]Apparatus
This section needs

procedure

additionalcitations for verification.(December

2010)

Simplified scheme of Millikans oil drop experiment

Oil drop experiment apparatus

Millikans and Fletcher's apparatus incorporated a parallel pair of horizontal metal plates. By applying a potential difference across the plates, a uniform electric field was created in the space between them. A ring of insulating material was used to hold the plates apart. Four holes were cut into the ring, three for illumination by a bright light, and another to allow viewing through a microscope. A fine mist of oil droplets was sprayed into a chamber above the plates. The oil was of a type usually used invacuum apparatus and was chosen because it had an extremely low vapour pressure. Ordinary oil would evaporate under the heat of the light source causing the mass of the oil drop to change over the course of the experiment. Some oil drops became electrically charged through friction with the nozzle as they were sprayed. Alternatively, charging could be brought about by including an ionising radiation source (such as anX-ray tube). The droplets entered the space between the plates and, because they were charged, it could be made to rise and fall by changing the voltage across the plates.

[edit]Method
This section needs additionalcitations for verification.(December
2010)

Initially the oil drops are allowed to fall between the plates with the electric field turned off. They very quickly reach a terminal velocity because of friction with the air in the chamber. The field is then turned on and, if it is large enough, some of the drops (the charged ones) will start to rise. (This is because the upwards electric force FE is greater for them than the downwards gravitational force g, in the same way bits of paper can be picked by a charged rubber rod). A likely looking drop is selected and kept in the middle of the field of view by

alternately switching off the voltage until all the other drops have fallen. The experiment is then continued with this one drop. The drop is allowed to fall and its terminal velocity v1 in the absence of an electric field is calculated. The dragforce acting on the drop can then be worked out using Stokes' law:

where v1 is the terminal velocity (i.e. velocity in the absence of an electric field) of the falling drop, is theviscosity of the air, and r is the radius of the drop. The weight w is the volume D multiplied by the density and the acceleration due to gravity g. However, what is needed is the apparent weight. The apparent weight in air is the true weight minus the upthrust (which equals the weight of air displaced by the oil drop). For a perfectly spherical droplet the apparent weight can be written as:

At terminal velocity the oil drop is not accelerating. Therefore the total force acting on it must be zero and the two forces F and w must cancel one another out (that is, F = w). This implies

Once r is calculated, w can easily be worked out. Now the field is turned back on, and the electric force on the drop is

where q is the charge on the oil drop and E is the electric field between the plates. For parallel plates

where V is the potential difference and d is the distance between the plates. One conceivable way to work out q would be to adjust V until the oil drop remained steady. Then we could equate FE with w. Also, determining FE proves difficult because the mass of the oil drop is difficult to determine without reverting back to the use of Stokes' Law. A more practical approach is to turn V up slightly so that the oil drop rises with a new terminal velocity v2. Then

[edit]Fraud

allegations

There is some controversy over the use of selectivity in Millikan's results of his second experiment measuring the electron charge raised by the historian Gerald Holton. Holton (1978) pointed out that Millikan disregarded a large set of the oil drops gained in his experiments without apparent reason. Allan Franklin, a former high energy experimentalist and current philosopher of science at the University of Colorado has tried to rebut this point by Holton.[5] Franklin contends that Millikan's exclusions of data did not affect the final value of e that Millikan obtained but concedes that there was substantial "cosmetic surgery" that Millikan performed which had the effect of reducing the statistical error on e. This enabled Millikan to quote the figure that he had calculated e to better than one half of one percent; in fact, if Millikan had included all of the data he threw out, it would have been to within 2%. While this would still have resulted in Millikan having measured ebetter than anyone else at the time, the slightly larger uncertainty might have allowed more disagreement with his results within the physics community. David Goodstein counters that Millikan plainly states that he only included drops which had undergone a "complete series of observations" and excluded no drops from this group.[6]

[edit]Millikan's

experiment as an example of psychological effects in scientific methodology

In a commencement address given at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1974 (and reprinted in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!), physicist Richard Feynman noted: We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the

next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that...[7][8] As of 2008, the accepted value for the elementary charge is 1.602176487(40)1019 C,[9] where the 40 indicates the uncertainty of the last two decimal places. In his Nobel lecture, Millikan gave his measurement as 4.774(5)1010 statC,[10] which equals 1.5924(17)1019 C. The difference is less than one percent, but it is more than five times greater than Millikan's standard error, so the disagreement is significant.

[edit]References
1. ^ Elektrizittsmengen, Phys. Zeit., 10(1910), p. 308 2. ^ Millikan, R. A. (1913). "On the Elementary Electric charge and the Avogadro Constant". Phys. Rev. 2 (2): 109 143. Bibcode 1913PhRv....2..109M. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.2.109. 3. ^ Praveen kumar Bandrawal (11 March 2009). Nobel Awards Winner Physics. Pinnacle Technology. pp. 169. ISBN 978-1-61820-254-3. Retrieved 14 December 2012. 4. ^ SLAC - Fractional Charge Search - Results 5. ^ Franklin, A. (1997). "Millikan's Oil-Drop Experiments". The Chemical Educator 2 (1): 114. doi:10.1007/s00897970102a. 6. ^ Goodstein, D. (2000). "In defense of Robert Andrews Millikan". Engineering and Science (Pasadena, Californi: Caltech Office of Public Relations) 63 (4): 3038. Retrieved December 2009. 7. ^ Feynman, Richard, "Cargo Cult Science" (adapted from 1974 California Institute of Technology commencement address), Donald Simanek's Pages, Lock Haven University, rev. August 2008.

8. ^ Feynman, Richard Phillips; Leighton, Ralph; Hutchings, Edward (1997-04-01). "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!": adventures of a curious character. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 342.ISBN 978-0-393-31604-9. Retrieved 10 July 2010. 9. ^ NIST Reference on Constants, Units and Uncertainty 10. ^ Millikan, Robert A. (May 23, 1924). The electron and the light-quant from the experimental point of view (Speech). Stockholm. Retrieved 2006-11-12.

The Discovery of the Electron

At the end of the 19th century, there was no generally accepted model of the atom. Most physicists believed that the atom was indivisible, although the discovery of radioactivity cast doubt on that in the minds of some physicists. At the same time it was generally believed that electric charge, like mass, was infinitely divisible.

Millikan Library at Caltech. The library is designed by Flewelling and Moody and completed in 1967

To explain the connection between electricity and matter, some scientists in the late 19th century argued that there had to be a fundamental unit of electricity. In 1891 the Irish physicist, George Stoney, introduced the term electron to describe this smallest unit of negative charge. In 1897 J. J. Thomson, an English physicist, conducted a series of experiments on cathode rays and after observing that the beam of light in the cathode ray tube is attracted to a positive charge and repelled by a negative charge he concluded that the rays consist of a stream of small, electrically negatively charged particles which have a mass over a thousand times less than that of a hydrogen atom. Thomson has discovered the electron. From this point onward, it becomes increasingly clear that atoms are not fundamental particles, but in fact are made up of smaller particles. As a result of his experiments, Thomson was able to measure the charge to mass ratio of the electron; he could not however, measure accurately the charge or mass independently. The measurement of the electron's charge independently was achieved by Millikan by his famous experiment from 1909 and with Thomson's results also a value for the electron mass was obtained. This experiment is called the "oil-drop experiment" and it was the first successful scientific attempt to detect and measure the effect of an individual subatomic particle. For this and his work on the photoelectric effect Robert Millikan won the 1923 Nobel Prize in physics.

The Oil-Drop Experiment

Simplified scheme of Millikans oil-drop experiment

The scheme of the experiment is as follows: An atomizer sprayed a fine mist of oil droplets into the upper chamber. Some of these tiny droplets fell through a hole in the upper floor into the lower chamber of the apparatus. Millikan first let them fall until they reached terminal velocity due to air resistance. Using the microscope, he measured their terminal velocity, and by use of aformula, calculated the mass of each oil drop. Next, Millikan applied a charge to the falling drops by irradiating the bottom chamber with x-rays. This caused the air to become ionized, which basically means that the air particles lost electrons. A part of the oil droplets captured one or more of those extra electrons and became negatively charged. By attaching a battery to the plates of the lower chamber he created an electric field between the plates that would act on the charged oil drops; he adjusted the voltage till the electric field force would just balance the force of gravity on a drop, and the drop would hang suspended in mid-air. Some drops have captured more electrons than others, so they will require a higher electrical field to stop. Particles that did not capture any of that extra electrons were not affected by the electrical field and fell to the bottom plate due to gravity. When a drop is suspended, its weight m g is exactly equal to the electric force applied, the product of the electric field and the charge q E. The values of E (the applied electric field), m (the mass of a drop which was already calculated by Millikan), and g (the acceleration due to gravity), are all known values. So it is very easy to obtain the value of q, the charge on the drop, by using the simple formula:

mg=qE

Millikan repeated the experiment numerous times, each time varying the strength of the x-rays ionizing the air, so that differing numbers of electrons would jump onto the oil molecules each time. He obtained various values for q. The charge q on a drop was always a multiple of 1.59 x 10-19 Coulombs. This is less than 1% lower than the value accepted today: 1.602 x 10-19 C.

Repeat the Oil-Drop Experiment

The Actual Apparatus Used in the Oil-Drop Experiment by Millikan

Warning: This experiment should be performed under teacher or adult supervision familiar with chemical, electricity and safety procedures. In the original experiment, Millikan ionized the air with x-rays which could be very dangerous and can harm your health. Today, in similar experiments are used instead low level alpha particles emitted from thorium-232 to ionize the air. Thorium-232 is now classified as carcinogenic and also poses hazards to the user. Our sound advice is to use an established laboratory facility in order to perform safely this experiment. This experiment requires some mechanics, physics, and electricity skills, and it is rather expensive and difficult to do properly, but not too much to deter a determined student.