The Positive Electron (1933)

http://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-positive-electron

by viriatus • 9 years ago

53 12 9 years ago

fermatslibrary.com

kmichaels• 9 years ago

Summary for this work in layman terms:

https://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/anderson.html

The positive electron (positron) appears to have been the first anti-particle identified.

jessriedel• 9 years ago

Yea. Positive and negative muons and pions were found after WWII. The anti-proton wasn't discovered until 1955 following the construction of the Bevatron, an accelerator powerful enough to reach the proton/anti-proton rest mass of ~1 GeV (i.e., a Billion eV).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevatron

PaulHoule• 9 years ago

There are positrons passing through the room you are in right now...

hossbeast• 9 years ago

Some of us occasionally do go outside

winter_blue• 9 years ago

Anti-particles and particles instantly annihilate each other on contact, so anti-particles cannot not exist in our world besides for brief moments.

There's a theory that half of the universe is made of anti-particles (and the other half composed of regular particles). So you could say that the half we inhibit has few anti-particles in it.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation

kkylin• 9 years ago

One of the consequences of relativistic QM, predicted to exist by Dirac: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron#Theory

delibes• 9 years ago

I like that he speculates a positron is an expanded proton. Why not? Probably less outrageous than antimatter.

averagewall2• 9 years ago

There is/was nothing outrageous about antimatter except the name. They could have called them "complimentary particles" or something more tame sounding. All particles can interact with other particles and produce reaction products. There was nothing novel about that either. Just because the reaction products here happen to be only photons instead of a mixture of photons and other new particles isn't much of a leap in surprisingness. They already knew about mass defect and E=mc^2, so the idea of converting part of a particle's mass to photons was already established.

rrmm• 9 years ago

Indeed, the name and their use in sci-fi settings trips people up into thinking they are some weird theoretical construct.

Medical imaging is a place where positrons are used in everyday life. Specifically, PET imaging or positron emission tomography in which a tracer dye is injected into the body. The tracer is usually biologically active, so that it is taken up in different amounts by different tissues. The tracer emits positrons which annihilate when they meet an electron and produce gamma rays which are then used to image tissue.

The Positive Electron (1933)

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