Scientists plan 3.84 Gigapixels virtual sensor made of 60 smartphone cameras to detect elusive antiproton annihilation events

• OPHANIM combines everyday tech with high-end scientific imaging capability

• Antimatter detection is now possible using repurposed smartphone camera tech

• Gigapixel device could reveal fine details of particle collisions instantly

At CERN’s Antimatter Factory, the AEgIS collaboration is exploring a novel approach to detecting one of nature’s rarest phenomena: antiproton annihilation.

eeNews reports the team, led by Professor Christoph Hugenschmidt from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed an experimental detector using sensors originally designed for mobile phone cameras.

Instead of creating a new sensor system from scratch, the researchers repurposed sixty 64-megapixel mobile camera sensors to form a 3.84-gigapixel array called OPHANIM, short for Optical Photon and Antimatter Imager. This composite detector can observe where antiprotons collide with matter, annihilating in a flash of energy...

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