Page "Antiparticle" Paragraph 6

In 1932, soon after the prediction of positrons by Paul Dirac, Carl D. Anderson found that cosmic-ray collisions produced these particles in a cloud chamber — a particle detector in which moving electrons ( or positrons ) leave behind trails as they move through the gas.

The electric charge-to-mass ratio of a particle can be measured by observing the radius of curling of its cloud-chamber track in a magnetic field.

Positrons, because of the direction that their paths curled, were at first mistaken for electrons travelling in the opposite direction.

Positron paths in a cloud-chamber trace the same helical path as an electron but rotate in the opposite direction with respect to the magnetic field direction due to their having the same magnitude of charge-to-mass ratio but with opposite charge and, therefore, opposite signed charge-to-mass ratios.