Mobile tech meets particle physics in stunning high-res imaging of antiproton annihilations.
What if your smartphone camera could do more than snap selfies and shoot videos — what if it could help scientists explore the nature of antimatter itself?
That’s exactly what the AEgIS collaboration, led by researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has done. By repurposing everyday smartphone camera sensors, they’ve engineered a groundbreaking detector capable of capturing antiproton annihilations in real time, at resolutions never seen before.
This novel device, detailed in Science Advances, pushes imaging capability to a jaw-dropping 0.6 micrometres — that’s a 35-fold leap in resolution compared to existing real-time detection systems.
From Smartphones to CERN: A Quantum Leap in Imaging
AEgIS, one of the key experiments at CERN’s Antimatter Factory, is on a mission to measure how antihydrogen — the antimatter twin of hydrogen — behaves under the pull of Earth’s gravity. To do this, the team sends antihydrogen particles through a horizontal beam, tracking minute vertical shifts using a moiré deflectometer and a detector that precisely logs each annihilation event.
And now, that detector has entered a new era.
“Mobile camera sensors have pixels smaller than one micrometre — ideal for our needs,” says Dr. Francesco Guatieri, the principal investigator. “We integrated 60 such sensors into a single detector, resulting in a record-shattering 3840 megapixel imaging system — the highest pixel count in any particle imaging detector ever built.”
The breakthrough enables AEgIS to rival traditional photographic plates, once the go-to technology for particle physics, but with the added benefit of real-time data and significantly more versatility.
Precision, Hacked
To make this sci-fi setup work, the team had to strip and re-engineer the sensors, removing layers designed for smartphones and adapting them to handle particle detection. “This took advanced micro-engineering and electronics expertise,” Guatieri explains.
But the true twist? The most precise part of the whole system wasn’t digital — it was human.
Despite the rise of AI, it turns out that good old-fashioned intuition still wins the day. The AEgIS team crowdsourced the task of pinpointing annihilation points to their colleagues. Each volunteer spent up to 10 hours manually identifying impact spots across more than 2,500 images. The result: accuracy that no algorithm could match — yet.
From Sparks to Science
Thanks to its staggering resolution, the new detector not only captures annihilation points but also tracks different fragments, distinguishing protons from pions by analyzing the width of their tracks.
“This detector is a game-changer,” says AEgIS spokesperson Ruggero Caravita. “It opens a whole new chapter for low-energy antiparticle annihilation studies — and more importantly, it’s a massive step forward for detecting the subtle influence of gravity on antimatter.”
So the next time you look at your phone, remember: the same tech powering your Instagram stories is also helping scientists at CERN unravel the universe’s deepest mysteries — one pixel at a time.
