And it's done at the microscopic level. In some cases, the researchers are looking for individual grains in the emulsion. Yet it is just that feature that makes emulsions so valuable. That's the power of emulsions. There are many different ways of detecting things, but they're on the order of millimeter resolution.
Emulsions are orders of magnitude better.
A proton decay experiment is in the hall in the background. If the fiber were as wide as a football stadium, then you would only know that the particle passed through the stadium. This is crucial in certain branches of particle physics since it's impossible to pull out a particle and put it on a scale to weigh it. Seeing what develops In stalking the elusive neutrino, detailed knowledge of the debris locations will be important to determining just what neutrinos do. First, though, the emulsions have to get into the mine.