Solar panels as cosmic-ray detectors
Carlo Stella, Michele Palatiello, Pedro Assis, Pedro Brogueira,, Catarina Espirito Santo, Patricia Goncalves, Mario Pimenta, Alessandro De, Angelis

TL;DR
This paper proposes using solar panels as large-area, low-cost detectors for extreme energy cosmic rays, enabling simultaneous power generation and cosmic-ray detection to explore high-energy physics beyond current accelerators.
Contribution
It introduces a novel approach of utilizing solar panels as Cherenkov light detectors for cosmic rays, combining energy harvesting with particle detection.
Findings
Solar panels can detect Cherenkov light from cosmic rays.
This method allows large-area, cost-effective cosmic-ray detection.
Potential for dual use in power generation and astrophysics research.
Abstract
Due to fundamental limitations of accelerators, only cosmic rays can give access to centre-of- mass energies more than one order of magnitude above those reached at the LHC. In fact, extreme energy cosmic rays (1018 eV - 1020 eV) are the only possibility to explore the 100 TeV energy scale in the years to come. This leap by one order of magnitude gives a unique way to open new horizons: new families of particles, new physics scales, in-depth investigations of the Lorentz symmetries. However, the flux of cosmic rays decreases rapidly, being less than one particle per square kilometer per year above 1019 eV: one needs to sample large surfaces. A way to develop large-effective area, low cost, detectors, is to build a solar panel-based device which can be used in parallel for power generation and Cherenkov light detection. Using solar panels for Cherenkov light detection would combine power…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
