News summary produced by Claude AI
Researchers at ETH Zurich and EPFL have created a prototype detector that combines light field camera technology with single-photon detection to track weakly interacting particles such as neutrinos and dark matter candidates in three dimensions. The new approach, described in Nature Communications, represents a departure from conventional segmented detector designs that divide materials into millions of individual units to track particle movements.
Traditional particle detectors use scintillating materials that emit light when charged particles pass through them. Scientists then use optical fibers and photomultiplier tubes to collect and count the photons, pinpointing particle locations through data from millions of tiny active sections. While precise, this method becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to scale, as demonstrated by large experiments such as the T2K neutrino detector in Japan, which contains approximately two million cubes and 60,000 fibers.
The PLATON prototype takes a fundamentally different approach by using plenoptic camera technology, which captures not only light intensity but also directional information about incoming photons. The system combines a micro-lens array with a single-photon avalanche diode imaging sensor developed by the team. This combination allows the detector to reconstruct three-dimensional particle tracks from faint light signals within an unsegmented block of scintillator material, eliminating the need for millions of individual components.
Laboratory tests demonstrated the prototype’s capability to detect electrons and reconstruct their positions using light levels as low as five photons. The researchers also incorporated artificial intelligence based on neural network architecture adapted from large language models to analyze photon patterns and identify particle interactions. Simulations suggest that an upgraded detector with dimensions of 10 by 10 by 10 centimeters could achieve spatial resolution below one millimeter, while a cubic-meter-scale detector could reach resolution of a few millimeters—comparable to state-of-the-art segmented systems.
The research team has already filed three patents exploring applications of PLATON technology in positron emission tomography for medical imaging. The developers view the technology as part of a broader tradition where fundamental physics experiments generate innovations with wider scientific and practical applications.