Positron spectroscopy as an analytical tool in material sciences

Full text: Positron annihilation spectroscopy has emerged as a powerful tool in material sciences due to its ability to provide information about the electron momentum distribution and electron density in a given medium. These features help in identifying altered state of electronic rearrangements as one encounters in phase transitions. In addition, positrons prefer regions of lower electron density such as open volume defects i.e. vacancies or vacancy clusters in metals, alloys and semiconductors or free-volumes in molecular solids. Its sensitivity to defects is extremely high e.g. it can detect as small a defect as monovacancy to concentration as low as parts per million(ppm). Innovative nuclear instrumentation has helped in getting chemical specificity at the annihilation site. For example, precipitates, embedded, nanoparticles or element decorated vacancies can now be easily identified. This presentation is structured to introduce the technique and provide a global perspective on area of applications. Specific examples on defect characterization, nanostructure-property correlations in polymers, advantages of elemental specificity by indexing the core electron momentum will be given. In addition, slow positron beam based studies on nanostructured materials as well as particle accelerator based positron spectroscopy for volumetric assay of defects in large engineering samples will be presented