DECO – Using cell phones to detect cosmic rays and other energetic particles

This project reminds me of a similar one I participated in when I was in High School: https://eee.centrofermi.it/

Some students were sent to CERN in Geneva to build detectors (which were essentially sandwiches of copper strips immersed in an atmosphere of sulphur hexafluride and some kind of freon-like gas) hooked up to a custom ASIC.

I was tasked to check in with the logger PC and check if the gas flow was ok and if it was still logging etc...

The data was then sent to a central server and a map of the rays was built.

The "distributed camera" is a central tenet of the intersection of computer vision and the global distribution of cellphones. It's pretty cool to see a distributed radio astronomy telescope array. With the additional benefit that it constitutes a baseline of ground truth in the form of cosmic rays. Not sure its robust enough for all environments and devices. But employing Nature itself is an exciting solution!

Can't find the link to download this app, can someone post it.

Very interesting. Here are some papers that they have listed [0]. They are using computer vision to detect charged particles that hit camera image sensors. [0]https://wipac.wisc.edu/deco/research

Would you actually have to place the phone face-up, or is face-down just as good? I'm assuming "on the side" is bad because you'd expect to primarily receive muons moving downward....

There is also the CREDO app, check the Google Android app store.