Swiss physicists build PLATON, a camera that tracks invisible particles in 3D using a single scintillator block
Researchers at ETH Zurich and EPFL unveiled PLATON, a particle detector that replaces millions of tiny components with one unsegmented block of scintillator read by a light-field camera and single-photon sensors. According to ETH Zurich and the study in Nature Communications, the prototype located electrons using as few as five detected photons.
Researchers at ETH Zurich and EPFL have built the first prototype of PLATON, a particle detector that reconstructs the 3D paths of invisible particles like neutrinos inside a single, unsegmented block of scintillator material. Instead of dividing a detector into millions of tiny cells wired to fibers, as Japan's T2K experiment does with roughly two million cubes and 60,000 fibers, PLATON uses a plenoptic light-field camera paired with single-photon avalanche diode sensors and a Transformer neural network to figure out where faint flashes of light originate. In laboratory tests the prototype located electrons from a strontium-90 source using as few as five detected photons, and simulations suggest a 10 cm cube could reach spatial resolution below one millimeter, scaling toward cubic-meter detectors. The team has filed three patents to bring the approach to PET medical imaging. Source: ETH Zurich, Nature Communications (DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-70918-x).