ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the interaction of other important nuclear particles with matter including ionized helium nuclei, electrons, and photons. Understanding these reactions is necessary to design radiation shields to protect people from the harmful effects of radiation and to understand how radiation can affect human beings. The chapter describes inelastic collisions, which play an important role in slowing down high-energy neutrons and converting them to thermal neutrons. In practice, the actual interaction is considerably more complex, and the motion of the alpha particle may result in many inelastic collisions where some of the kinetic energy is transferred to electrons and then the photons emanating from the electron cloud. There are many atomic and nuclear reactions that can occur as its transfers its energy to other molecules and atoms. When an atomic nucleus splits apart, it converts itself into two roughly equal sized pieces called fission fragments.
