AEgIS turns phone sensors into antimatter camera of unprecedented resolution

Summary

The AEgIS collaboration, led by a team from the Technical University of Munich, has repurposed smartphone camera sensors to create a detector capable of imaging antiproton annihilations in real time with unprecedented resolution Did you know that the camera sensor in your smartphone could help unlock the secrets of antimatter? The AEgIS collaboration, led by Professor Christoph Hugenschmidt’s team from the research neutron source FRM II at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed a detector using modified mobile camera sensors to image in real time the points where antimatter annihilates with matter. This new device, described in a paper just published in Science Advances, can pinpoint antiproton annihilations with a resolution of about 0.6 micrometres, a 35-fold improvement over previous real-time methods. AEgIS and other experiments at CERN’s Antimatter Factory, such as ALPHA and GBAR, are on a mission to measure the free-fall of antihydrogen within Earth’s gravitational field with high precision, each using a different technique. AEgIS’s approach involves producing a horizontal beam of antihydrogen and measuring its vertical displacement using a device called a moiré deflectometer that reveals tiny deviations in motion and a detector that records the antihydrogen annihilation points. “For AEgIS to work, we need a detector with incredibly high spatial resolution, and mobile camera sensors have pixels smaller than 1 micrometre,” says Francesco Guatieri, the principal investigator on the paper. “We’ve integrated 60 camera sensors into our detector, enabling it to achieve a resolution of 3840 mega pixels – the highest pixel count of any imaging detector to date.” Previously, photographic plates were the only option, but they lacked real-time capabilities,” added Guatieri. “Our solution, demonstrated for antiprotons and directly applicable to antihydrogen, combines photographic-plate-level resolution, real-time diagnostics, self-calibration and a good p...