Annihilation. The word itself brings to mind destruction and conflagration. In the atomic realm, however, the rules are different. One company has developed a way to play by those rules. It has developed a way to test materials nondestructively based on the physics of the subatomic world. In this technology, particles are created only to be destroyed.
The technology, called Photon Induced Positron Annihilation (PIPA), was invented by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (Boise, ID) and licensed to Positron Systems Inc. (Boise) for commercial use.