when electron is bombarded in vaccum tube it deflects away and passes through metal atoms suggesting hollow space but electron to electron bombardment /collision activity is not known.
Your explanation refers to scattering of electrons and capture in metals. These are not nuclear reactions.
In nuclear reactions the radiation may be classified as beta rays.
There is a large class of nuclear reactions in which a high speed electron is captured in a nucleus, changing a proton to an neutron, giving off a neutrino, and lowering the atomic number by one unit without much change in atomic weight. The result is an isotope of a different element from the starting material, and in most cases will be unstable with short half life. The new isotope rapidly decays into a beta particle, an antineutrino, and the original starting isotope that was hit by an electron. The new isotope exists long enough to verify that the nuclear reaction occurred. Also there is other evidence collected from particle intensities, momentums, and angles of travel to show the reaction sequence occurred, and the actions were not just the simple scattering that occurs commonly in collisions.
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