The latest CREDO paper is out, demonstrating that the signals we detect using your smartphone really are from cosmic rays. The way we can tell is that there is are many more cosmic rays hitting you (and your phone’s CCD!) from directly above relative to the horizon. This is a cosine squared dependency, and with some very clever modelling the team showed we could recover such a profile (as well as measuring the thickness of the CCD in the phones used in the study too which is neat!)
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The wider CREDO team in this paper took a step forward in complexity by connecting up four CosmicWatch detectors together and confirm that this low-cost commodity based detector can see extensive air showers as the cosmic rays cause a spread out cascade of particles by the time they reach the Earth’s surface. This work shows just how cost-effective it can be for even schools let alone universities to explore this region of ultra-high energy particle physics!
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A big moment for the global project on cosmic ray detection - CREDO - which is attempting to find super-cosmic ray shows that scatter high energy particles across continent scales. Our first published paper, now accepted in Astroparticle Physics, focusses on the detection of such events by next-generation Gamma-ray detectors like the Cherenkov Telescope Array. Huge congrats to Dariusz and Kévin who led this work. Can’t wait for the next batch of pre-print papers to be accepted too..!
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The first paper by PhD student Shanti Krishnan who I co-supervise with Prof Geoff Brooks, and it’s fair to say that she has blown us all away with the level of work (and quite frankly technical brilliance) in this paper in the Journal of Instrumentation.
Shanti has designed a novel solution to detecting muons with a low-cost silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) that offers a robust, miniaturized, and cost-effective, cosmic ray detector. Pretty amazing first publication!
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Turn your smartphone into a cosmic ray hunter with the free CREDO app! Currently available on Android (any Apple developers out there get in contact) and already with 2.5 million detections the growing userbase is helping us search for the most extreme events in the Universe. Not that this helped me with Virginia on News Breakfast who asked me some seriously tough (but as usual, brilliant) questions on the health risks of Cosmic Rays.
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The Cosmic-Ray Extremely Distributed Observatory (CREDO) project is turning smartphones into cosmic ray detectors, allowing a global search for extremely extended cosmic-ray phenomena, the cosmic-ray ensembles (CRE), beyond the capabilities of existing detectors and observatories.
This paper explains the incredible science opportunities with CREDO.
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