DECO Smartphone App Puts A Cosmic Ray Detector In Your Pocke
Source: Jeff Miller
Image Above: Justin Vandenbroucke, an assistant professor of physics, holds a pair of smartphones in Chamberlin Hall. Vandenbroucke has created a pocket cosmic ray detector app, DECO, which uses the image sensor of a cellphone camera.
We use our smartphones for a myriad of things, from normal phone activities to finding constellations in the night’s sky. And soon, your smartphone could be used to detect cosmic rays, much like the high-end, multimillion-dollar observatories.
We use our smartphones for a myriad of things, from normal phone activities to finding constellations in the night’s sky. And soon, your smartphone could be used to detect cosmic rays, much like the high-end, multimillion-dollar observatories.
The app ― which is only available for Android phone so far, but should be coming to other smartphone operating systems before long ― will allow your camera to be turned into a detector to capture the light particles generated when cosmic rays impact the atmosphere of our planet.
“The apps basically transform the phone into a high-energy particle detector,” explained Justin Vandenbroucke, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of physics and a researcher at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC). “It uses the same principles as these very large experiments.”
Researchers believe that cosmic rays are energetic subatomic particles created in cosmic accelerators ― such as black holes and supernovae. When these subatomic particles collide with Earth’s atmosphere, a shower of secondary sparks, called muons, are generated.
Muons work much like light particles, called photons, when they strike the silicon chip that runs a smartphone camera. In a process called the photoelectric effect, the muon, or the photon, strikes the silicon of the chip causing the release of an electric charge. The signature of that charge can then be logged, stored and analyzed.
Our planet is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays, whose origins continue to confuse scientists. The high-energy particles in cosmic rays travel vast distances with trajectories that bend as they cross the magnetic fields of other planets and galaxies. Cosmic rays are abundant enough to obscure other observations that astronomers are attempting to locate other phenomena.
Vandenbroucke explained in a statement that the idea of a pocket cosmic ray detector is, for the most part, educational. He began the project during his graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, working with classmate Kenny Jensen, who wrote an early version of the application.
The project is called Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory (DECO). It has received funding from the American Physical Society, the Knight Foundation, the Simon-Strauss Foundation, and QuarkNet, a national program in particle physics and teacher development. Recent Janesville Craig High School graduate and WIPAC intern Matthew Plewa helped to complete the app programming.
“I’d been working in the Android ecosystem for a while and it was just one of those hobbies that happened to work out,” says Plewa, who plans to study engineering at Iowa State University.
The group from WIPAC plans to engage high school teachers to create curricular materials for the smartphone cosmic ray detector in order to turn the DECO project into a true educational presence.
There are two apps which need to be downloaded to turn your own smartphone into cosmic ray detector. Then you need to cover the camera lens with duct tape and place the screen up just about anywhere. It can even be placed in a closed desk drawer as muons are able to penetrate matter in the same way X-rays can.
An idle, running cell phone can be set to record images within the app. These images are then analyzed to search for particle events. The DECO app will take an image every couple of seconds, and analyze the image for a certain number of lighted pixels. If there are enough, the image is recorded as an event. The app is able to record particle tracks from both radioactivity in the environment and cosmic rays.
The app also includes a data logger which routes event information ― time, location, and observations ― to a central database to match them to cosmic phenomena detected by other, more sophisticated observatories.
The app was validated by Vanderbroucke by being set up to log data on long-distance commercial airline flights. Although he doesn’t expect his pocket cosmic ray detector to overtake large, sophisticated observatories, he would like to see DECO evolve into a meaningful “citizen science” project.
“It would be great to get students and the public interested in gathering data and understanding the particles around them, things they ordinarily don’t get a chance to see,” said Vandenbroucke.
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