The basic principles of positron annihilation were considered, and the 3 most important experimental techniques which were used for bulk studies were described. These were: positron lifetime, angular correlation, and Doppler broadening methods. Several examples of the use of these methods were given, for metals, ceramics and molecular materials, which illustrated the sensitivity of the positron annihilation techniques to vacancy-type defects. It was shown how information could be obtained concerning vacancy formation energies, vacancy migration and clustering, vacancy-impurity interactions, rare-gas densities in bubbles in metals, and regions of free volume in molecular materials.

M.Eldrup: Journal de Physique IV, 1995, 5[C1], 93-109