It has seen that Gama, neutron, proton deutron, etc are used to do initiate the artificial radioactivity. But never seen beta rays to do the same. anybody can account for this?
If you use "normal" beta rays from radioactive sources, the energy of thes betas is to low, to damage nuclei directly by collisions. There is no plausible interaction between hadrons and electrons, which could release nucleons.
Hadrons like protons, neutrons ions, alphas etc can transfer so much energy to the target nucleus, that the binding energy of nucleons is exceeded with the consequence of emitting one or more nucleons. In those cases the equilibrium of the nucleus is disturbed and they get radiactive. You also can provoke fission. In this case you can get radioactive fission fragments.
BTW, I haven't heard that people are using gamma ray to create radioactivity. If you want to use gamma ray to kick a proton out from a nucleus, you need pretty high intensity and high energy, so you need an accelerator to create this kind of gamma beam.
As for very high energy electrons, they do damage the nucleus. They even interact with quarks directly and generate a bunch of stuff (jet). So they are very good probes of the inner structure of nucleus, even nucleon.
@Ran,
really no problem. The production of radioactive nuclei even happens at medical accelerators with photon maximum energy higher than ca. 10 MeV via (gamma,n) and (gamma,p) processes.
I even managed nuclear fission experiments and analysis by using photons. Your remark to high energy electrons (and positrons) is ok, but the question here handles beta particles with typical maximum energies of about 2 - 3 MeV.
beta is heavy particles, so it has low energy and cannot penetrate like gamma or neutrons
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