Deutsch, Martin

▪ 2003

      Austrian-born American physicist (b. Jan. 29, 1917, Vienna, Austria—d. Aug. 16, 2002, Cambridge, Mass.), discovered positronium, a fleeting hydrogen-like atom that contains a particle of antimatter. Building on the work of physicists Paul Dirac and Carl Anderson, Deutsch showed in 1951 that during the encounter of a negatively charged electron and its positively charged antimatter counterpart, a positron, the two particles orbit around a common centre for less than a billionth of a second before annihilating each other in a burst of gamma rays. This demonstration confirmed Einstein's theory that matter could be converted entirely into energy and further substantiated the theory of quantum electrodynamics for a two-particle system.

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