A Study on Charged Particle and Its Interaction With Matter: Interaction of Charged Particles with Different Materials

Abstract

Alpha particles react strongly with matter because theyare comparatively heavy and have a charge, producing large numbers of ions perunit length of their path. As a result, they are not very penetrating. Forexample, 5 MeV alpha particles will only travel about 3.6 cm in air and willnot penetrate an ordinary piece of paper. For the other materials the averagetravel distance with respect to air is approximately inversely proportional tothe respective densities of each material. 5 MeV alpha particles will onlytravel about 4 μm in mammal tissue.