text: 196,101,1415554652804947974,2377407248,Daniel Whiteson,"New paper! Measuring how well a smartphone camera can detect cosmic muons! <LINK> Led by Jeff Swaney and Mike Mulhearn, with @cshimmin What? Your phone can see particles? When a muon passed through your phone camera, it frees up electrons, just like when a photon does. So the camera sees that pixel as on. If you cover the lens and put the phone in a muon beam, presto, you see tracks! <LINK> We wanted to do much more: to turn the network of smartphones into a world-wide detector for cosmic particles. <LINK> To do that, we needed to measure how often the phone sees or misses a particle. So we put some phones between two scintillators: <LINK> And measured how often we spotted the muon in the phone. Along the way, we had to reverse engineer how the phone turns electrons into digitized values, so we could measure the pure response: <LINK> This will help us understand how well a network of phones can act as a global detector (<LINK>) TLDR: smartphones are about 70-80% efficient at detecting muons! @y0b1byte Yes, if the flux is very high, but that's not a concern for cosmic rays. More of an issue is that the performance degrades if phone is kept at high temperature for too long. @Antony_Clements @SeamusBlackley @cshimmin Maybe! A lot of it is noise from badly-behaving pixels. We had to filter out the hot pixels to get a reliable muon signal.",https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06332,"A measurement of the efficiency of CMOS sensors in smartphone cameras to cosmic ray muons is presented. A coincidence in external scintillators indicates the passage of a cosmic ray muon, allowing the measurement of the efficiency of the CMOS sensor. The observed flux is consistent with well-established values, and efficiencies are presented as a function of the number of photo-electrons collected from the CMOS silicon photodiode pixels. These efficiencies are vital to understanding the feasibility of large-scale smartphone networks operating as air-shower observatories. ",Measurement of Smartphone Sensor Efficiency to Cosmic Ray Muons,9,"['New paper!\n\nMeasuring how well a smartphone camera can detect cosmic muons!\n\n<LINK>\n\nLed by Jeff Swaney and Mike Mulhearn, with @cshimmin', 'What? Your phone can see particles?\n\nWhen a muon passed through your phone camera, it frees up electrons, just like when a photon does. So the camera sees that pixel as on. If you cover the lens and put the phone in a muon beam, presto, you see tracks! https://t.co/l8AwyMsQlp', 'We wanted to do much more: to turn the network of smartphones into a world-wide detector for cosmic particles. https://t.co/SFtUZQwVdy', 'To do that, we needed to measure how often the phone sees or misses a particle. So we put some phones between two scintillators: https://t.co/W1FCNyvUu9', 'And measured how often we spotted the muon in the phone.\n\nAlong the way, we had to reverse engineer how the phone turns electrons into digitized values, so we could measure the pure response: https://t.co/cMOPXF6drO', 'This will help us understand how well a network of phones can act as a global detector (https://t.co/FWCchA1MX5)', 'TLDR: smartphones are about 70-80% efficient at detecting muons!', ""@y0b1byte Yes, if the flux is very high, but that's not a concern for cosmic rays.  More of an issue is that the performance degrades if phone is kept at high temperature for too long."", '@Antony_Clements @SeamusBlackley @cshimmin Maybe!  A lot of it is noise from badly-behaving pixels. We had to filter out the hot pixels to get a reliable muon signal.']",21,07,1356