The Evans Family Beyond Lecture: Observing the Universe With Your Phone
Observing the Universe with Your Phone
Daniel Whiteson, Professor of Physics & Astronomy
What if your smartphone could help solve one of the universe's greatest mysteries?
Professor Daniel Whiteson, a physicist who helped discover the Higgs boson by peering into matter's smallest building blocks, is now searching for new particles that could revolutionize our understanding of reality. In this talk, Professor Whiteson will explore how the next breakthrough in fundamental physics might come from the device in your pocket. Through the CRAYFIS (Cosmic Rays Found in Smartphones) project, he’s working to transform billions of smartphones into a planet-sized detector for ultra-high-energy cosmic rays—particles nearly a billion times more energetic than anything we can produce on Earth. These rare and difficult to observe particles hit any given square kilometer of Earth just once a century, yet they hold secrets about the universe's most extreme environments.
Join us as we explore how the next breakthrough in fundamental physics might come from your smartphone (yes, the one you’re holding right now) and discover what these cosmic particles reveal about our universe's most spectacular secrets.
Continental breakfast will be provided.
For questions, please contact physicalsciences@uci.edu.
The Ruth Ann and John Evans Family Beyond Lecture invites you into the minds of visionary researchers who are decoding the universe's deepest enigmas and igniting curiosity in future scientific pioneers. The annual series offers timely scientific lectures that are free and open to the public.
Professor Whiteson’s research is in the field of Experimental High Energy Physics. He is interested in probing the structure of matter and the nature of its interactions at the very smallest scales, to understand the fundamental nature of our universe.Whiteson is part of the ATLAS collaboration which built, maintains, and collects data from the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, where the Higgs boson was discovered. His research uses the LHC to investigate the basic building blocks of the Universe around us, hoping to find new kinds of particles or interactions and reveal a deeper and simpler layer underlying our reality.
In 2014, Whiteson set out on a mission to conceive the largest particle experiment ever constructed. Along with his team, he developed Cosmic Rays Found in Smartphones (CRAYFIS), a smartphone app which uses a cell phone’s camera to detect ultra high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). These particles are nearly a billion times as energetic as the particles in the Large Hadron Collider, and their origin is a mystery. The challenge is that UHECRs are very rare with about 1 particle per square kilometer over 100 years. Therefore, a very large detector is needed. CRAYFIS would turn the network of the roughly two billion existing phones into a planet-sized detector of cosmic rays. In 2015, CRAYFIS won a Webby Award, known as the Grammys of the internet, in the category Experimental & Innovation Sites.
Whiteson’s research has appeared widely in popular media outlets including The New Yorker, Ars Technica, VICE and many others. Along with his colleagues he created popular comics including “What’s in the data? The Higgs Boson Explained” and “True Tales of Dark Matters,” which were all featured on PBS. Upon receiving his Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley, Dr. Whiteson was appointed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. He came to UCI in 2007 where he received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research.