D. Fiorina

Deep in a cave beneath the Italian Apennines, a tank of gas sits in the dark. Inside, charged particles fly through, leaving faint flashes of light in their wake. These flashes are like the wake of a boat on dark water: they reveal where the particle went and how fast.

In giant accelerators, particles zip through detectors in billionths of a second, and telling one from another requires a stopwatch of incredible precision. The new µRWELL-PICOSEC detector acts as such a stopwatch: it captures the moment a particle passes with a precision of 48 picoseconds: that's 48 trillionths of a second.