Cosmic rays are particles from deep space, accelerated to colossal energies. Smashing into the atmosphere, they trigger particle showers with radio waves. These waves are fingerprints, revealing the energy and direction of the intruder. But, decoding each trail used to take hours of simulation based on micro-world laws — the Standard Model. Now, a trained detective program cross-checks the signal against a library of simulated snapshots in a split second, like an investigator instantly identifying a suspect from a mugshot database. It filters out false leads and finds the best match. Thus, the particle’s portrait is reconstructed.
The method was tested on the GRANDProto300 detector, which catches particles traveling almost at the speed of light. Energy was determined with 9% precision, direction with a fraction of a degree error. This is no worse than current methods, but hundreds of times faster. Mass analysis could one day unravel the mystery of supernovae — gigantic stellar explosions that accelerate particles.
Only one ultra-high-energy particle hits Earth per square kilometer in an entire century.