With the right funding, experts estimate we could see the dawn of the positron age in as few as five years. Positron Dynamics is one key player in the new wave of technology, working on an innovative method for cooling down and capturing positrons, the antimatter equivalent of the common electron. Whenever a positron and an electron meet, they annihilate each other, which presents a serious challenge for anyone working with them. It’s particularly difficult because electrons are literally everywhere, floating in clouds around essentially every atom in the universe. Right now, the best solution for cooling the positrons is running them through a block of frozen neon (called a "moderator"), which offers a minimum of stray electrons. But the system only catches roughly one in 100 positrons, and in the 30 years it’s been in use, no one’s been able to improve on it. Positron Dynamics thinks it can do better, and with seed funding from Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs, the company has enough money to find out. "We’ve run some initial simulations, and it looks like we could be able to create as many as 10 micrograms of positrons a week with a linear accelerator," says co-founder Ryan Weed, PhD, a physicist and former cryogenic engineer for Jeff Bezos’s space flight company Blue Origin. That’s a flood compared to the current trickle that’s coming from isotope-based methods, and it could be enough to turn positron creation into a self-sustaining business.
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 11:24:14 +0000
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