How to Use positron in a Sentence

positron

noun
Definition of positronnext
  • Both electrons and positrons have a small mass unlike photons, which have no mass.
    — Aristos Georgiou, Newsweek, 21 Mar. 2018
  • But every once in a while, the team observed, an electron-positron pair hit the detector at a 140-degree angle.
    — Quanta Magazine, 14 June 2016
  • Electrons can then be added to create an electron-positron plasma.
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 11 Dec. 2018
  • One involves a kind of brain scan known as positron emission tomography, or PET, while the other requires a spinal tap.
    — Elie Dolgin, Newsweek, 16 Feb. 2017
  • The antiparticle version of an electron, for instance, is a positron.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 21 Sep. 2021
  • His design would measure the spectrum and shape of the initial Cherenkov flash and thus the energy of the progenitor antineutrinos from the positrons.
    — Jesse Emspak, Scientific American, 1 May 2017
  • The first stage will see the FCC collide electrons with positrons, the antimatter electron counterpart.
    — Avery Thompson, Popular Mechanics, 16 Jan. 2019
  • Like the sun on a bad day, this young magnetar releases occasional flares that blast out electrons, positrons and maybe heavier ions at near the speed of light.
    — Joshua Sokol, WIRED, 10 Mar. 2019
  • Two of the products of that decay are an electron and a positron, which can be picked up by detectors, allowing the production of the J/ψ mesons to be registered.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 3 Apr. 2023
  • When excited, an atom can absorb a third photon, which strips away its positron entirely.
    — Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 4 Apr. 2018
  • The electron, quark, and muon, for example, are paired with the positron, antiquark, and antimuon, respectively.
    — Sophia Chen, Wired, 19 Feb. 2020
  • Rarely, a proton in the oil will absorb an electron antineutrino to turn into a neutron while ejecting a positron—sort of the reverse of beta decay.
    — Byadrian Cho, science.org, 11 Jan. 2023
  • An electron, for instance, can appear along with a positron, which is positively charged; the two charges cancel each other out to preserve the total charge of zero.
    — Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 24 Apr. 2023
  • The positron discovered by Paul Dirac had a mass and spin identical to that of an electron but an opposite electrical charge, not an opposite spin and charge.
    — New York Times, 2 Oct. 2023
  • The experiments used entangled photons, rather than pairs of an electron and a positron, as in many thought experiments.
    — Andreas Muller-University Of South Florida, Discover Magazine, 19 Oct. 2022
  • By contrast, the researchers observed that some electrons and positrons seem to be correlated in their emission direction.
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 20 Dec. 2019
  • The intensity is large enough that electrons and their antiparticle, positrons, are produced from the vacuum.
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 9 Nov. 2017
  • When this collision occurs, the proton transforms into a neutron and ejects a positron, the antimatter version of an electron.
    — Kenneth Chang, New York Times, 27 Mar. 2018
  • Wu and Shaknov packed the copper isotope into a tiny capsule, eight millimeters long, and waited for electrons and positrons to collide inside the apparatus.
    — Michelle Frank, Scientific American, 13 Mar. 2023
  • If the electrons and positrons had originated from persistent rho particles with a characteristic energy or mass, there would have been a bump in the curve.
    — Quanta Magazine, 30 July 2019
  • Bananas, which contain trace amounts of radioactive potassium, emit a positron every 75 minutes.
    — Sophia Chen, Wired, 19 Feb. 2020
  • This causes the radioligand to decay, and emit positrons, the antimatter counterpart to electrons.
    — Calum Chace, Forbes, 21 Apr. 2023
  • An electron and its antiparticle, a positron, have identical properties except for charge, but the charge of the Majorana particle would be zero.
    — Neil Savage, Scientific American, 8 May 2018
  • This may involve imaging studies, such as positron emission tomography (PET).
    — Doru Paul, Verywell Health, 19 Mar. 2023
  • The dance between positron and antiproton in antihydrogen should exactly follow that of the electron and proton in hydrogen.
    — Sophia Chen, Wired, 19 Feb. 2020
  • One was a study using positron emission tomography — PET scans — that showed different areas of the brain were associated with each form of memory.
    — Michael S. Rosenwald, Washington Post, 3 Oct. 2023
  • If that's the case, then there's another consequence of this theory: Electrons moving backwards in time are positrons, the antimatter component of electrons.
    — Avery Thompson, Popular Mechanics, 11 Aug. 2017
  • As early as the 1960s, physicists first thought about measuring gravity’s effects on positrons, or anti-electrons, which have positive rather than negative electric charge.
    — Rahul Rao, Popular Science, 27 Sep. 2023
  • Beams of energy collide with atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere, spawning charged subatomic particles like pions, muons, electrons, and positrons, whose ionized trails show up as spindly lines in cloud chambers.
    — Bill Gourgey, Popular Science, 23 Nov. 2023
  • Richard Feynman, a young professor at Cornell, had invented a novel method to describe the behavior of electrons and photons (and their antimatter equivalent, positrons).
    — George Johnson, SFChronicle.com, 29 Feb. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'positron.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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