• Question: Do you work on actual cameras or is your work just similar to the way cameras work?

    Asked by to Clara on 12 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Clara Nellist

      Clara Nellist answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      I don’t work on actual cameras, that research is mostly done by companies that wants to make money by selling new cameras. Or sometimes by astrophysicists who want to take pictures of space. Like the camera on the Hubble Space Telescope for example, which takes incredible photos of galaxies billions of light years away!

      I talk about my detector being like a camera because a lot of people use them everyday and it helps them to understand how it works. The sensors I work with are very similar to the sensor inside your digital camera and are also split into pixels. In a camera and in the detector, the sensor is the part that actually records the data (either light, or in my case, any particle with electrical charge). When a new particle like a Higgs boson is made, it doesn’t stick around very long and quickly changes into lots of lighter particles. Our detector essentially takes a picture of these other particles that have been created to be able to go back later and work out what they were. Then we can say that a Higgs was there.

      Also, when you buy a new camera, it tells you how many pixels you have, like 10 megapixels, or 16 megapixels and this gives you an idea of how much detail you’re going to be able to save in your photo. You can try comparing a zoomed in photo from your phone with one from a camera. The one from the phone will start to show the pixels a lot sooner. Part of my work is to make the pixels in our sensors smaller so we can get more of them in one place, just like upgrading your camera from 10->16 megapixels.

      Unlike a camera though, the detectors I work with get damaged by the particles that pass through them and over time they don’t work as well as they used to. So my job is to try to design better sensors that can take all the punishment of working in a very radioactive environment. Especially since the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is going to be working at higher energies from next year. Which means more radiation and more damage!

      Hope that helps!

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