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Photo sensor from smartphones helps with antimatter research at CERN

TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH

NEWS RELEASE

Mayor improvement for particle research at CERN

Smartphone photo sensors transformed into an unprecedented resolution antimatter camera

  • Sensors taken from commercially available mobile phones
  • 35 times better resolution than before
  • Two TUM Master's students significantly involved

At CERN, scientists from the AEgIS collaboration led by a team of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have repurposed smartphone camera sensors to create a detector capable of tracking antiproton annihilations in real time with unprecedented resolution. 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.

Scientists working together in the “Antihydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy” (AEgIS) and other experiments at CERN’s Antimatter Factory, such ALPHA and GBAR, are on a mission to measure the free-fall of antihydrogen under Earth's gravity 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 micrometer,” says Francesco Guatieri from the research neutron source FRM II at TUM and Principal Investigator of the research. “We have integrated 60 of them in the single photographic detector, the Optical Photon and Antimatter Imager (OPHANIM), with the highest number of pixels currently operational: 3840 MPixels. Previously, photographic plates were the only option, but they lacked real-time capabilities. Our solution, demonstrated for antiprotons and directly applicable to antihydrogen, combines photographic-plate-level resolution, real-time diagnostics, self-calibration and a good particle collection surface, all in one device.”

Converted image sensors

Specifically, the researchers used optical image sensors that had previously been shown to be capable of imaging low-energy positrons in real time with unprecedented resolution. “We had to strip away the first layers of the sensors, which are made to deal with the advanced integrated electronics of mobile phones,” says Guatieri. “This required high-level electronic design and micro-engineering.” Master's students Michael Berghold and Markus Münster at the TUM School of Engineering and Design played a key role in the project.

Extraordinary resolution

“This is a game-changing technology for the observation of the tiny shifts due to gravity in an antihydrogen beam travelling horizontally, and it can also find broader applications in experiments where high position resolution is crucial, or to develop high-resolution trackers,” says AEgIS spokesperson Dr. Ruggero Caravita. “This extraordinary resolution enables us also to distinguish between different annihilation fragments, paving the way for new research on low-energy antiparticle annihilation in materials,” concludes Caravita.

Publication:

M. Berghold et al: Real-time antiproton annihilation vertexing with sub-micron resolution, published in: Science Advances, 2 April 2025, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads1176

Further information:

In addition to researchers from the AEgIS collaboration at CERN and the FRM II, scientists from several other international institutions were also involved in the study.

Additional material for media outlets:

Photos for download: https://go.tum.de/802229

Scientific contact:

Dr. Francesco Guatieri

Group of Prof. Christoph Hugenschmidt at FRM II

Technical University of Munich

+39 324 74 079 38

Francesco.Guatieri@frm2.tum.de

https://www.frm2.tum.de/en/frm2/home/

Contact at the TUM Corporate Communications Centre:

Ulrich Meyer

Press Spokesman

+49 89 289 22778

presse@tum.de

www.tum.de

The Technical University of Munich (TUM) is one of the world’s leading universities in terms of research, teaching and innovation, with around 700 professorships, 53,000 students and 12,000 staff. TUM’s range of subjects includes engineering, natural and life sciences, medicine, computer sciences, mathematics, economics and social sciences. As an entrepreneurial university, TUM envisages itself as a global hub of knowledge exchange, open to society. Every year, more than 70 start-ups are founded at TUM, which acts as a key player in Munich’s high-tech ecosystem. The university is represented around the world by its TUM Asia campus in Singapore along with offices in Beijing, Brussels, Mumbai, San Francisco and São Paulo. Nobel Prize laureates and inventors such as Rudolf Diesel, Carl von Linde and Rudolf Mößbauer have conducted research at TUM, which was awarded the title of University of Excellence in 2006, 2012 and 2019. International rankings regularly cite TUM as the best university in the European Union.

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