Friday, September 16, 2016

What products can beta particles and photon emitters be found in?

By using the terms "beta particles" and "photon emitters" we make these technologies sound very exotic and futuristic. But a beta particle is just an electron (or positron, which is an antimatter electron---whether those are different things is a surprisingly deep question) released at high energy, and a photon is something even more pedestrian: Light.

Normally we think of beta particles as being emitted in radioactive decay (i.e. beta decay), but the particles are the same even if they're emitted some other way.

Any product that uses high energy electrons and emits light therefore contains beta particles and photon emitters.

The best example of both I can think of is a tritium fluorescent light; the radioactive decay of tritium into helium-3 is a beta decay releasing an electron, and tritium lights use this effect to trigger photoelectric diodes that then emit photons we see as light. This is unambiguously both beta decay and photon emission. Tritium lights are often used in glow-in-the-dark watches; their long life and zero-maintenance reliability also makes them good lights for emergency exit signs.

Beta decay is often used to trace leaks in pipes and measure the thickness of metal sheets, because beta radiation is very easily shielded. Beta decay is also essential for radioactive dating, as one of the decay modes of carbon-14 is beta decay.

Another example of a consumer product with both beta particles and photon emitters is an old-style cathode-ray-tube (CRT) TV or computer monitor; inside the TV is a big vacuum tube where a beam of high-energy electrons is waved around by magnetic fields to hit the proper places on a screen, where the photoelectric effect converts them into photons of the appropriate color. All of this happens about 30 times per second across the whole screen, the cathode beam waving across and down the screen in a pattern that is usually interlaced so that they do all the even-numbered rows and then all the odd-numbered rows. Since it's not actually beta decay, this is arguably not beta particles; but the energies are the same.

Photon emitters are all over the place, from LCDs to lasers. Anything that produces light uses a photon emitter. (In some sense everything is a photon emitter, since even you and I emit infrared photons as blackbody radiation just from being warm.)

And of course if you include all electrons as beta particles (the distinction is somewhat arbitrary; electrons are electrons, in a very deep fundamental sense), they're also all over the place; there's a reason we call them "electronics". The electrons traveling through a computer or smartphone are at much lower energies than typical beta decay electrons; but they're the same fundamental particle.

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