Moseley's law is an empirical law concerning the characteristic X-rays emitted by atoms. The law had been discovered and published by the English physicist Henry Moseley in 1913–1914. Until Moseley's work, "atomic number" was merely an element's place in the periodic table and was not known to be associated with any measurable physical quantity. In brief, the law states that the square root of the frequency of the emitted X-ray is approximately proportional to the atomic number : ν ν ∝ ∝ Z .