Anderson Discovers the Positron 49 (1932) ‘Anderson! [1] was born in New York but grew up in Los Angeles, where he attended a technically oriented high school. From his physics teacher he heard of the recently founded California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and, al- though discouraged by other teachers, he applied and was admitted as student of physics. The domineering figure there was Millikan, Besides leading Cal- tech as a whole he was also Chairman of the Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy. He chose the subject of Anderson’s Ph.D. thesis, the spatial distribution of electrons produced by X rays, but as Anderson recollected, the busy ‘Chief” never came to see him in his lab, Before the completion of his thesis Anderson saw Millikan to inquire if he could stay on at Caltech for post-doctoral studies but was told that, having done both his undergraduate and his graduate work there, he should go elsewhere with a National Research Council fellowship. He applied for a fellowship and got an invitation by Compton to work in Chicago in case he would get one. But some time later, to his surprise, Millikan asked him to stay on for a year and set up equipment for cosmic-ray measurements. His chances of getting a fellowship would be much better with an additional year of experience. Since Millikan was a member of the fellowship selection committee, Anderson, who by then was looking forward to move to Chicago, felt that he had no choice in the matter. He stayed and shifted his work to cosmic rays. Until the end of the 1920s cosmic rays were thought to be high-energy gamma rays. But in 1929 Bothe and Kolharster had registered very penetrating charged particles (see Episode 34) and also cloud-chamber photographs [2] had been obtained by Skobelzyn®, Having obtained his Ph.D. in June 1930, ‘Anderson designed and built a cloud chamber which could be placed in a high magnetic field. If a charged particle traverses such a ‘magnetic cloud cham- ber’, it is deflected by the field and leaves a curved track. ‘The momentum of the particle can be obtained by measuring the curvature. The tracks of a positive and a negative particle are curved in opposite directions. The mag netic field, which could be as high as 2.5 Tesla or 25000 Gauss, was provided by an electromagnet with water-cooled copper windings powered by a large generator, originally used for a wind tunnel at Caltech. Anderson produced his first photographs with tracks from cosmic rays in 1931. Millikan was convinced that the primary cosmic rays were photons of high energy and he expected the tracks to be all electrons, resulting from Compton scattering of the primary photons off electrons in the matter some- where above the cloud chamber. Anderson, therefore, was surprised when he ¥ Carl David Anderson (1905-1991), Nobel Prize 1986? Dimitry Skobelzyn (1892-1980) 21449, Anderson Discovers the Positron (1932) 215 found tracks from positive and negative particles to be about equally frequent. Millikan was in Europe and showed the photographs he got from Anderson in Paris and in Cambridge. He took the positive particles to be protons. In April 1932 Millikan and Anderson submitted a paper [3] in which they explained the findings by stating that a primary photon can also react with an atomic nucleus. ‘Their reasoning: ‘Positive particles obviously come only from the nucleus. In other words, the positive tracks were taken to be caused by protons or even heavier fragments of the nucleus. More detailed studies by Anderson showed, however, that at least some of the positive tracks could not be caused by protons. One way to classify tracks in a cloud chamber is to look at the density of droplets along their path. It is proportional to the number of ion pairs per unit length of path formed by the particle traversing the chamber gas. For a particle with one elementary charge, i.e., a proton or an electron, itis small if the particle moves with a velocity not far from the speed of light. One speaks of minimum ionization, Since the pro- ton is so much heavier than the electron, for not too large momenta, less than, say, 1 GeV/c, the speed of a proton is much smaller than that of an electron with the same momentum, i.e., the same curvature in the magnetic field, In this momentum range the tracks of protons and electrons look quite different: Proton tracks have many droplets per inch; they are thick. Electrons tracks have few and are thin. Anderson found that his tracks of positive particles in that momentum range had the track density of electrons rather than of protons. ‘There was still one way out: A negative particle entering the chamber from below and moving upwards would leave the same kind of track as a positive particle entering the chamber from above and moving downwards. (If the neg- ative particle is deflected to the right along its path, then the positive particle is deflected to the left.) Anderson was inclined to take the tracks in question to be caused by upward-moving electrons. But Millikan, pointing out that it was common knowledge that cosmic-ray particles travel downwards, insisted that they were produced by protons, in spite of the anomalous droplet density Anderson found a way to measure the direction taken by a particle. He inserted a lead plate in the cloud chamber. A particle traversing the plate would lose part of its energy and momentum. The radius of curvature of the track ‘would be smaller after the traversal. In 1961 Anderson recalled the following about this stage of the experiment [4] Itwas not long after the insertion of the plate that a fine example was ob- tained in which a low-energy light-weight particle of positive charge was ‘observed to traverse the plate from below and moving upward through the lead plate. Ionization and curvature measurements clearly showed this particle to have a mass much smaller than that of a proton and, indeed, ‘a mass entirely consistent with an electron mass. Curiously enough, de- spite the strong admonitions of Dr. Millikan that upward-moving cosmic- ray particles were rare, this indeed was an example of one of those very rare upward-moving cosmic-ray particles, ‘More photographs with similar features were obtained, but the one described above was the main illustration in Anderson's paper entitled The Positive Elec- tron and received by the Physical Review on 28 February 1933 [5]. Itis also re- produced in many textbooks. In this paper Anderson uses the name positron for216 49. Anderson Discovers the Positron (1932) Anderson's cloud-chamber photograph showing the track of @ positron flying upwards and losing about two thirds of its ‘energy in the lead plate, which is mounted horizontally in the middle of the chamber, Figure reprinted with permission from [5]. Copyright 1933 by the American Physical Society the new particle. Half a year earlier he had already published a short note [6], not accompanied by a photograph, about his findings. Here the wording was ‘more careful but he concluded that the most likely interpretation of the positive tracks was that they were caused by ‘a positively-charged particle comparable in mass and magnitude of charge with an electron’. It was this note which established Anderson’s priority as discoverer of the positron. ‘Two physicists in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge were close at his, heels. One of them, Blackett, was already very experienced with cloud cham- bers, with which he had verified Rutherford’s experiment on the transformation of the nucleus of nitrogen (see Episode 28). He was assisted by Occhialini, a young Italian physicist from the University of Florence. They, too, had de- signed a magnetic cloud chamber to study tracks of the cosmic radiation and they were the first to use a new experimental technique. After expansion a cloud chamber is sensitive for a short time. If photographed upon expansion, most of the photographs are empty, since tracks of high-energy charged parti- cles are rare. Blackett and Occhialini found a way by which the particles ‘can bbe made to take their own cloud photographs’, as they wrote. Their method was not unalike that used in today’s radar trap, in which a driver triggers a camera by the very fact that he or she is speeding. One Geiger counter was placed below the chamber and one above it and, when both counters, in coincidence,49, Anderson Discovers the Positron (1932) 217 «gave a signal, it could be assumed that the chamber as well as the two counters hhad been traversed by a charged particle. ‘The chamber was then automati- cally expanded and a photograph was taken, This sel/triggering mechanism increased the efficiency of the chamber by a large factor. Blackett and Occhialini submitted an extensive paper [7] with many pho- tographs three weeks before the Physical Review received Anderson’s full pa- per. They confirm Anderson's early report; there are positive electrons. More- over, they develop the hypothesis of pair production: *... one may imagine that negative and positive electrons may be born in pairs during the disinte- gration of light nuclei.” (We know now that pair production takes place in the collision of a photon of sufficiently high energy with an electric charge which can be carried by a nucleus or an electron.) Also the fate of positrons is discussed, in particular, that they are likely to ‘disappear by reacting with a negative electron to form two or more quanta.’ The two authors report about a discussion they had with Dirac about this annihilation process and report numbers that Dirac computed. The mean life of positrons with energies below 100 keV in water is given as 3.6 x 10's, In their paper Blackett and Occhialini not only confirm the existence of the positron and propose mechanisms for its production and annihilation. ‘They are also the first to report a phenomenon they called a cosmic-ray shower, an avalanche of reactions in which more and more charged particles are produced. Although the Cavendish scientists give a reference to Dirac’s prediction of fan anti-electron, neither their nor Anderson’s experiment were motivated by it, ‘They wanted to study cosmic rays. Later, Anderson wrote [4] about the discover The discovery ofthe positron was wholly accidental. Despite the fact that Dirac’s relativistic theory of the electron was an adequate theory of the positron, and despite the fact that the existence of this theory was well known to nearly all physicists, it played no part whatsoever in the dis- covery of the positron, [...] Its highly esoteric character was apparently not in tune with most of the scientific thinking of the day. Furthermore, positive electrons were not needed to explain any other observations. Anderson also speculated on what a ‘sagacious person’ might have done and writes (4): ‘Had he been working in a well equipped laboratory and had he taken the Dirac theory at face value he would have discovered the positron in a single afternoon’ Indeed, a high-energy y-ray source and a cloud chamber with a modest magnetic field would have sufliced. There was no need for cos- mic rays. Anderson himself performed this experiment [8] after the positron was discovered. One wonders if he did it in a single afternoon. In the pa- pers [5,8] he acknowledges the assistance of Mr. Seth H. Neddermeyer. Only three years later, the two men together discovered another unknown particle (see Episode 57). BI i 6) (6 m (8) Occhialini (le) and Blacket, Anderson, C. D., The Discovery of Anti-Matter, World Scientific, Singapore, 1999. Skobelzyn, D., Zeitschrift far Physik, 59 (1929) 686. Millikan, R.A. and Anderson, ©.D,, Physical Review, 40 (1932) 325, Anderson, C. D., American Journal of Physics, 29 (1961) 825. Anderson, C. D., Physical Review, 43 (1933) 491 Anderson, C. D., Science, 76 (1932) 238, Blackett, P. M. S, and Occhialini, G.P.S., Proceedings of the Royal Society, A139 (1933) 699. Anderson, C. D., Science, 77 (1933) 432,