# Swiss Physicists Build a Camera That Films Invisible Particles Like Neutrinos in 3D

*2026-07-18 06:01 UTC · Science · 1 min read*

> ETH Zurich and EPFL scientists built PLATON, a single-block particle detector that uses a light-field camera and AI to track neutrinos and dark matter candidates in 3D, replacing millions of wired components.

Researchers at ETH Zurich and EPFL have unveiled PLATON, a new type of particle detector that reconstructs the 3D paths of neutrinos and other weakly interacting particles using a single block of light-producing material instead of millions of tiny wired components.

The device, described by PhD student Till Dieminger, Dr. Saul Alonso-Monsalve, Professor Davide Sgalaberna and Professor Edoardo Charbon, combines a light-field (plenoptic) camera with single-photon avalanche diode sensors and a transformer-based neural network. The camera captures both the intensity and direction of scintillation light produced when a particle passes through the block, letting AI software reconstruct its track even from as few as five detected photons. In prototype tests on a 10x10x10 cm block, PLATON achieved sub-millimeter spatial resolution; simulations suggest a full cubic-meter version could still resolve tracks to a few millimeters.

Legacy detectors like Japan's T2K experiment need roughly 2 million individual scintillator cubes wired with electronics to achieve similar 3D tracking. Replacing that wall of hardware with one monolithic block and a camera could make future neutrino and dark-matter experiments cheaper to build and easier to scale up. The work, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, was published July 17 in Nature Communications.

## Sources

- [sciencedaily.com](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260716023610.htm)
- [nature.com](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-70918-x)

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TechTools News · https://techtools.cz/tools/news/article/2026-swiss-physicists-build-a-camera-that-films-invisible-particles-like-neutrinos
Česká verze: https://techtools.cz/tools/news/clanek/2099-svycarsti-fyzici-sestrojili-kameru-ktera-ve-3d-nataci-neviditelne-castice-jako