Hacked Cell Phone Camera Captures Antimatter with Unprecedented Precision

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Technological Innovation Website Editorial Team - 04/28/2025

Optical antimatter sensor, consisting of 60 photosensors attached to cell phones. [Image: Andreas Heddergott/TUM]

How to film antimatter

The atoms that make up normal matter fall, pulled by gravity. So, will antimatter atoms fall upwards?

Preliminary tests indicate no, that antimatter responds to gravity like matter .

But it is necessary to be certain, which is why several teams linked to CERN, which manages the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), have joined forces in a mission to measure the free fall of antihydrogen under the action of pure Earth gravity, without other interferences. The idea is that each group will use a different technique, and in all cases achieve unprecedented precision.

One such technique involves producing a horizontal beam of antihydrogen and measuring its vertical displacement using a device called a moiré deflectometer, which detects small deviations in the motion, and a detector that records the points of annihilation of the antihydrogen. This project is called AEgIS, an acronym for "Antihydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy."

Until now, the only option was to use photographic plates, the pre-digital technology, but standard cameras did not provide a real-time capture technique. "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 a single device," said Professor Francesco Guatieri, the team's coordinator.

And the solution didn't involve building new types of state-of-the-art cameras: The solution was found inside cell phones.

"For AEgIS to work, we need a detector with incredibly high spatial resolution, and mobile camera sensors have pixels smaller than 1 micrometer," Guatieri explained. "We integrated 60 of them into a single photo detector, OPHANIM (Optical Photon and Antimatter Imager), with the largest pixel count currently in operation: 3.84 gigapixels."

Individual antiproton beams pass through a degrader and are trapped by the AEgIS (red arrows). The electrode voltages on the beamline are then reconfigured to allow extraction towards the 45° branch, after which the trap is opened and the antiprotons are implanted into the sensor (green arrows). [Image: Michael Berghold et al. - 10.1126/sciadv.ads1176]

How to hack a cell phone camera

Specifically, the researchers used optical imaging sensors that had previously been shown to be capable of capturing real-time, high-resolution images of low-energy positrons. But they had to adapt them for the new use.

"We had to remove the first layers of the sensors, which are designed to handle the advanced electronics embedded in the phones," Guatieri said. "This required high-level electronic design and microengineering."

Students Michael Berghold and Markus Munster from the Munich University of Technology in Germany took on the challenge and got to work. They turned a smartphone camera into an antiproton annihilation sensor with unprecedented resolution — 35 times better than any previous detection technology.

"This is a revolutionary technology for observing small changes due to gravity in a horizontally travelling beam of antihydrogen, and it could also find wider applications in experiments where high position resolution is crucial, or for developing high-resolution trackers," said Professor Ruggero Caravita. "This extraordinary resolution also allows us to distinguish between different annihilation fragments, paving the way for new research into low-energy antiparticle annihilation in materials."

Now the team is preparing to set up the new camera in CERN's antimatter laboratory and begin collecting data.

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