Researchers have developed a novel high-energy particle detection instrumentation approach that leverages the power of quantum sensors -- devices capable of precisely detecting single particles.
To learn more about the nature of matter, energy, space, and time, physicists smash high-energy particles together in large accelerator machines, creating sprays of millions of particles per second of a variety of masses and speeds. The collisions may also produce entirely new particles not predicted by the standard model, the prevailing theory of fundamental particles and forces in our universe.
This is a significant step toward developing advanced detectors for future particle physics experiments, says co-author Si Xie, a scientist at Fermilab who has a joint appointment at Caltech as a research scientist."This is just the beginning," he says."We have the potential to detect particles lower in mass than we could before as well as exotic particles like those that may constitute dark matter.
For the particle physics tests, the researchers used SMSPDs rather than the SNSPDs, because they have a larger surface area for collecting the sprays of particles. They used the sensors to detect charged particles for the first time, an ability that is not needed for quantum networks or astronomy applications but is essential for particle physics experiments."The novelty of this study is that we proved the sensors can efficiently detect charged particles," Xie says.
"In these collisions, you might want to track the performance of millions of events per second," Spiropulu says."You are swamped with hundreds of interactions, and it can be hard to find the primary interactions with precision. Back in the 1980s, we thought having the spatial coordinates were enough, but now, as the particle collisions become more intense, producing more particles, we also need to track time.
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