Positron

The mystery of the missing antimatter

There’s an awful lot of articles about antimatter and mystery. For example there’s a 2017 Symmetry magazine article matter-antimatter mystery remains unsolved. It’s about the BASE experiment at CERN where they’ve measured the antiproton magnetic moment. Surprise surprise, it’s the exact opposite of the proton magnetic moment. Then there’s the LiveScience article mystery deepens: matter and antimatter are mirror images. Of course they are, the positron has the opposite chirality to the electron. And then there’s the CERN courier article does antimatter fall up? No it…

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What charge is

The electron doesn’t have an electric field, it has an electromagnetic field. If you’re a positron and I set you down near a motionless electron, you will move linearly towards it, and it will move linearly towards you. So you might think the electron has a radial electric field, which results in a linear electric force. But it doesn’t. That linear force is there because the electron has an electromagnetic field, and so does the positron. Linear and rotational force Moreover the interaction between these fields…

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The positron

The positron is usually described as a fundamental or elementary particle. That doesn’t tell you much, but when you look for more information, it’s rather scant. You soon learn that the positron  has a mass of 9.109 x 10-31 kg or 511keV/c². You learn that it has a charge of 1.602 x 10−19 Coulombs or +1e, the e being elementary charge. You also learn that it has spin ½. However you don’t learn much else. Particularly since the particle data group doesn’t have a listing for…

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