Forward emission of positronium from nanochanneled silicon membranes

Mariazzi, S.; Rienäcker, B.; Maffei, Riccardo Magrin; Povolo, L.; Sharma, Sushil; Caravita, R.; Penasa, L.; Bettotti, Paolo; Doser, M.; Brusa, R. S.

doi:10.1103/physrevb.105.115422

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…For fundamental physics experiments such mesoporous based-silica converters are used for the production of positronium and its emission into vacuum (Aghion et al, 2018;Amsler et al, 2019Amsler et al, , 2021Cassidy et al, 2012;Cassidy and Mills, 2007;Cooper et al, 2016;Gurung et al, 2020;Wall et al, 2015); see also Section IV. Special meso-structured based-silica thin films enable emission of positronium in transmission (forward) and in reflection (backward) relative to the direction of the positron beam (Andersen et al, 2015;Mariazzi et al, 2022).…”

Section: B Positronium Formation Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Positronium Physics and Biomedical Applications

Bass¹,

Mariazzi²,

Moskal³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Positronium is the simplest bound state, built of an electron and a positron. Studies of positronium in vacuum and its decays in medium tell us about Quantum Electrodynamics, QED, and about the structure of matter and biological processes of living organisms at the nanoscale, respectively. Spectroscopic measurements constrain our understanding of QED bound state theory. Searches for rare decays and measurements of the effect of gravitation on positronium are used to look for new physics phenomena. In biological materials positronium decays are sensitive to the inter-and intra-molecular structure and to the metabolism of living organisms ranging from single cells to human beings. This leads to new ideas of positronium imaging in medicine using the fact that during positron emission tomography (PET) as much as 40% of positron annihilation occurs through the production of positronium atoms inside the patient's body. A new generation of the high sensitivity and multi-photon total-body PET systems opens perspectives for clinical applications of positronium as a biomarker of tissue pathology and the degree of tissue oxidation.

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