Australian Positron Beamline Facility
Forming the beam
When we have our trapped positrons, we are able to form a beam by carefully raising the confining potential and allowing the trapped positrons to spill out. This then gives us a very high resolution beam (around 25 meV energy width) which can then be used for various experiments. Due to the trapping process, the beam is also pulsed, with each pulse having a time width of about a microsecond.
The entire trapping and beam formation process take place in a strong magnetic field (approximately 500 gauss), so this needs to be taken into consideration while doing the experiments. It turns out that this can have some big advantages compared to electrostatic techniques. This is explained further in the sections on Atomic and Molecular Physics and Materials Analysis.
