Seeing the Invisible: Scientists Develop New Way To Track Particles in 3D

ETH Zurich and EPFL researchers built a prototype detector that uses plenoptic light-field imaging to reconstruct 3D particle tracks in unsegmented scintillators.

The system combines a micro lens array with a SPAD sensor (SwissSPAD2) to capture ultrafast photon patterns inside large detector volumes.

Simulations and lab tests, published in Nature Communications, showed the approach can recover particle trajectories in three dimensions.

The design could help make future detectors larger, cheaper, and more precise by avoiding the limits of heavily segmented architectures, with benefits for neutrino and rare-particle studies.