The following applet shows a simulation of Rutherford scattering assuming alpha particles impinging on a gold nucleus. The impact parameter is limited to a maximum value of 100 femtometers and a minimum value of 2 femtometers. Trajectories can be randomly selected and fired one at a time or fired one at a time in a uniform pattern inside the range of allowed impact parameters chosen by the user. Individual trajectories can also be selected for impact parameters by clicking on the applet sufficiently far to the left of the scattering center and within the range of 100 femtometers of impact parameter. Two detectors at 60° and 135° measure scatters which hit within 30° of the center of the detector.

A bunch of trajectories can be launched at once with the "Fire Many Trajectories" button. This is considered an "experiment" and the relative counts between the forward detector (detector 1 at 60° ) and backward detector (detector 2 at 135° ) , i.e. (number of hits in det.1)/(number of hits in det. 2). The histogram area in the lower right keeps track of the number of scattered particles hitting each detector. For impact parameters randomly selected from a range equal to 100 fm, the applet calculates the cross-section as detemined by the number of hits in the forward detector vs. the number of incident alpha particles. This can be done for other impact parameter ranges, but only for the case of 8 MeV incident particles since the correction for finite impact parameter range and finite distance of the detectors from the scattering center are only done for the 8 MeV case for anything other than 100 fm impact parameter range.

For convenience, the "Many Experiments" button allows you to increase the statistical power of the measurement by automatically performing the experiment "many" times.