Antielectron

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A subatomic particle identical in mass to an electron but carrying a positive electric charge, serving as its antimatter counterpart; found in particle physics and important in processes like annihilation
2. A fundamental particle equal in mass to the electron yet with opposite charge, representing the positron and playing a role in antimatter interactions and medical imaging technologies
3. The antimatter equivalent to an electron, distinguished by a positive charge while matching electron mass, involved in high-energy physics and particle-antiparticle annihilation phenomena

Etymology: Paul Dirac predicted the antielectron in 1928, before anyone had seen one. His equation for the electron, which combined quantum mechanics with special relativity, produced solutions with negative energy, and Dirac proposed that these were not nonsense but a sign of a particle with the electron's mass and an opposite electric charge. The positive counterpart was first detected in 1932, when Carl Anderson, studying cosmic rays in a cloud chamber, photographed tracks curving the wrong way in a magnetic field. The name is a plain compound. "Anti-" is a Greek-derived prefix meaning "against" or "opposite", and it is attached to "electron", the name coined in the 1890s for the charged particle. Dirac's original spelling was "anti-electron", with the hyphen, and the word was built the same way as other terms formed on the same pattern, such as "antiproton" and "antineutron".

Synonyms: positron, antielectron, beta plus particle

Antonyms: electron, beta minus particle