Researchers at ETH Zurich and EPFL have developed a radical new particle detector called PLATON that could transform how scientists track invisible subatomic particles — replacing millions of individual detector components with a single block of light-producing material and an advanced camera.
The system, described in Nature Communications, draws inspiration from plenoptic cameras — also known as light field cameras — which capture not just the intensity of incoming light but also the direction from which it arrived, allowing 3D scene reconstruction.
Traditional particle detectors divide their sensitive material into vast numbers of small active sections. Japan's T2K neutrino experiment uses about two million cubes connected by 60,000 fibers. As detectors grow larger, this becomes a major bottleneck.
The team built a proof-of-concept combining a micro-lens array with a SPAD imaging sensor called SwissSPAD2. They tested PLATON's resolution at light levels from several hundred photons down to only five — and simulations closely matched lab measurements.
The team also developed a Transformer-based neural network to analyze patterns in detected photons and reconstruct particle interactions. Simulations indicate a 1m³ PLATON detector could match state-of-the-art detectors without needing millions of parts.
The researchers have filed three patents for using PLATON in PET medical imaging, which could significantly improve scan sharpness. "Particle physics has a long history of producing technologies that later find broader uses," they noted.
