I Positron discovery in cloud chamber, how so?

DaTario
Messages
1,092
Reaction score
46
Hi All,

I was watching a video from Veritassium () when it was said that positron discovery was made in a cloud chamber. If the anti-particle of the electron is passing through a dense cloud of atoms and molecules, won't it be natural for this anti-particle to meet an electron and go through a fast pair anihilation, giving rise to photons?

Best wishes

DaTario
 
Physics news on Phys.org
IIRC, our school's cloud-chamber had an optional magnetic field via a pair of coils. Trails from the 'source' spiralled one way for electrons, other way for their anti-kin. And, if you were quick, measurement of curl's diameter allowed a useful estimate of energy etc...

Our school had a 'Treasure Trove' of Nuffield teaching equipment, akin to 1st-year Uni Physics level...
 
Toponium is a hadron which is the bound state of a valance top quark and a valance antitop quark. Oversimplified presentations often state that top quarks don't form hadrons, because they decay to bottom quarks extremely rapidly after they are created, leaving no time to form a hadron. And, the vast majority of the time, this is true. But, the lifetime of a top quark is only an average lifetime. Sometimes it decays faster and sometimes it decays slower. In the highly improbable case that...
I'm following this paper by Kitaev on SL(2,R) representations and I'm having a problem in the normalization of the continuous eigenfunctions (eqs. (67)-(70)), which satisfy \langle f_s | f_{s'} \rangle = \int_{0}^{1} \frac{2}{(1-u)^2} f_s(u)^* f_{s'}(u) \, du. \tag{67} The singular contribution of the integral arises at the endpoint u=1 of the integral, and in the limit u \to 1, the function f_s(u) takes on the form f_s(u) \approx a_s (1-u)^{1/2 + i s} + a_s^* (1-u)^{1/2 - i s}. \tag{70}...
Back
Top