M. Pomorski

A charged particle beam is like a jet of water from a hose: it can be narrow or diffuse, steady or curved. To know exactly where particles are headed, you need a sensitive screen. In the WISArD experiment at ISOLDE, CERN's accelerator, that screen is a compact detector based on microchannel plates.

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.