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Applications

Beta particles can be used to treat health conditions such as eye and bone cancer and are also used as tracers. Strontium-90 is the material most commonly used to produce beta particles.

Beta particles are also used in quality control to test the thickness of an item, such as paper, coming through a system of rollers. Some of the beta radiation is absorbed while passing through the product. If the product is made too thick or thin, a correspondingly different amount of radiation will be absorbed. A computer program monitoring the quality of the manufactured paper will then move the rollers to change the thickness of the final product.

An illumination device called a betalight contains tritium and a phosphor. As tritium decays, it emits beta particles; these strike the phosphor, causing the phosphor to give off photons, much like the cathode-ray tube in a television. The illumination requires no external power, and will continue as long as the tritium exists (and the phosphors do not themselves chemically change); the amount of light produced will drop to half its original value in 12.32 years, the half-life of tritium.

Beta-plus (or positron) decay of a radioactive tracer isotope is the source of the positrons used in positron emission tomography (PET scan).