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'''The positron''' is the antiparticle of the [[Electron|electron]]: a particle with the same mass and the same spin as an electron but with the opposite sign of electric charge. It was the first antiparticle to be predicted and the first to be found.

Paul Dirac's 1928 relativistic wave equation had solutions of negative as well as positive energy. Rather than discard them, Dirac proposed in 1931 that the negative-energy states were normally all occupied and that a hole in that filled sea would behave as a positively charged particle of electronic mass — an "anti-electron". Carl Anderson photographed such a track in a cloud chamber in 1932 while studying cosmic rays, and Patrick Blackett and Giuseppe Occhialini confirmed the identification in 1933. In the modern account the positron is the antiparticle of the electron, produced in pair production when a photon of at least 1.022 MeV converts near a nucleus, and in the β<sup>+</sup> decay of proton-rich nuclei. When a positron meets an electron the pair annihilates, most often into two gamma rays of 511 keV emitted back to back; positron emission tomography is built on detecting that coincidence. A positron and an electron can also form a short-lived bound state, positronium, before annihilating.

One genuine open question in mainstream physics sits here: if matter and antimatter are produced symmetrically, the observable universe should contain as much antimatter as matter, and it does not. The asymmetry has no accepted explanation.

==On this wiki==

The positron is unusually prominent in the literature collected here, because several researchers treat the electron–positron pair, rather than the quark or the point lepton, as the basic building block of matter.

[[Don L Hotson]] makes the strongest version of the claim. In [[Dirac's Equation: A Relativistic Generalization of the Schrödinger Wave Equation - The Other Half]] (2001) and [[Dirac's Equation and the Sea of Negative Energy, Part 2]] (2002) he argues that Dirac's equation was "shorn of half of its solutions" in 1934 by a manoeuvre he holds to be invalid, and that taken whole the equation describes four kinds of electron — electrons and positrons of positive energy and electrons and positrons of negative energy. From these four, he contends, the entire physical universe can be built, fulfilling Dirac's original hope that the equation would describe "everything that waves."

[[Ernest J Sternglass]] reached a similar destination independently and much earlier, developing a relativistic electron–positron pair model in which particles are tightly bound pairs circulating at near light speed and in which the universe itself grows from such a pair — a scheme that dispenses with quarks entirely. His book [[Before the Big Bang: The Origins of the Universe]] sets out the cosmological side of it.

Among the structural modellers, [[David L Bergman]]'s [[The Stable Elementary Particles]] (1992) extends the spinning charged ring of [[Common Sense Science]] from the electron to the positron, proton and antiproton, choosing the ring's parameters to return the observed spin, magnetic moment, size and mass in each case. [[Thomas N Lockyer]]'s [[The Precise Positron and Electron]] (2010) derives electron and positron mass, spin angular momentum, charge and magnetic moment from his vector particle geometry, and argues that the fine-structure constant and the size-independence of the fundamental charge follow from it. [[John Frank Johnson]]'s [[A Time for Renaissance in Particle Physics]] (1998) builds all matter from just two particles, the electron and the positron, using only nineteenth-century physics.

[[David Tombe]] gives the pair a role in the medium rather than in matter. On his account, developed in [[The DNA of Electromagnetic Radiation (The Electron-Positron Dipole)]] (2006) and [[The Richness and Quality of the Electron-Positron Dipole]] (2006), electrons are ''sinks'' and positrons are ''sources'' in an aethereal fluid; the basic physical unit is the rotating electron–positron dipole, and charge is simply the rate of flow into or out of it.

The same pair appears as the fabric of space itself in the ''epola'' model of [[Menahem Simhony]], argued for by [[Robert Guy Grantham]] in [[The Fabric of Space as an Electron-Positron Lattice and Implications for GRT]] (2010), where the vacuum is a solid lattice of bound electrons and positrons and the curvature of general relativity, gravitation, inertia and de Broglie waves are read as electromagnetic effects of that lattice. [[A H Brady]]'s [[Vacuum Energy Density and the Mechanism of Gravity]] (1994) takes the vacuum to be a cold plasma of electron–positron pairs, calculates ''G'' from it, and proposes those pairs as the [[Dark Matter|dark matter]] of the universe.

See [[:Category:Particle Physics]] for the wider particle literature held here.

==See also==

* [[Electron]]
* [[Standard Model]]
* [[Photon]]
* [[Dark Matter]]
* [[Aether]]
* [[Energy]]

[[Category:Particle Physics]]
[[Category:Structure]]
[[Category:Quantum Theory]]

Positron - Revision history

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