ETH Zurich And EPFL Researchers Unveil Plenoptic Camera System For High Resolution 3D Tracking Of Subatomic Particles

ETH Zurich and EPFL researchers use light field technology and SPAD sensors to achieve high-resolution 3D neutrino tracking in unsegmented materials.

By: AXL Media

Published: Apr 25, 2026, 6:20 AM EDT

Source: Information for this report was sourced from EurekAlert!

Overcoming the Bottleneck of Scintillator Segmentation

Scientific findings published in Nature Communications on March 21, 2026, introduce a radical shift in how particle physicists detect weakly interacting particles like neutrinos. Traditionally, tracking elementary particles requires segmenting large volumes of scintillator material into millions of tiny cubes or fibers, a process that becomes economically and technically unsustainable as detector sizes increase. A team from ETH Zurich and EPFL has successfully demonstrated that unsegmented materials can be used for 3D tracking by applying plenoptic, or light field, imaging techniques originally developed for advanced photography.

The Mechanics of Plenoptic Particle Tracking

The PLATON detector functions by capturing not only the intensity of light produced when a particle passes through a scintillator but also the direction and depth of the photons. This is achieved through a micro-lens array (MLA) placed between the scintillator and a specialized imaging sensor. Each tiny lens in the array acts as an individual camera, allowing the system to reconstruct a 3D map of the light field. This approach eliminates the need for thousands of optical fibers, providing a more streamlined and scalable architecture for high-resolution particle imaging.

Integrating Ultrafast SPAD Array Sensors

At the heart of the PLATON prototype is the SwissSPAD2, a single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) array sensor developed at EPFL. This sensor allows for gated photon detection, meaning it can isolate specific temporal windows to filter out background noise from the true signal. Researchers are already working on an upgraded version of this sensor to achieve sub-nanosecond temporal resolution. With this improvement, detected photons will receive precise time stamps, further enhancing the system's ability to track the ultrafast trajectories of particles like electrons and neutrinos with unprecedented clarity.