Can these sensor chips really unlock the secrets of the Universe?

Ambition is a fine thing, it helps drive progress. But when German chip maker Infineon broadcast in a press release headline recently that its eight inch sensor chips could reveal the mysteries of the Universe I thought that was taking ambition an astronomic step too far.

Would such sensor chips really tell us the secrets of the Universe? Could they even confirm that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Universe, and everything is 42; just as Douglas Adams’ mega-computer Deep Thought did in his wonderful book the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?

Casting both ambition and reality aside for just a moment, Deep Thought churned away for 7½ million years to compute and check the answer and concluded it was 42. Deep Thought did point out however that the answer was meaningless because the beings that received the answer never actually knew what the original question was.

Back to reality

But back to reality and those Universe probing sensor chips from Infineon. I doubt if they could really unveil the full story given that there are around 140 billion galaxies spanning the Universe.  

However, it’s fair to say that these chips could contribute to proving the existence of dark matter. They were developed jointly by Infineon Technologies Austria and the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of High Energy Physics (HEPHY). Eventually tens of thousands of these silicon components could be employed at CERN, the particle physics laboratory. These particular components say the manufacturer resist constant radiation bombardment better than previous components and because of that durability they age more slowly.

Mathematically demanding

The sensor chips will be used in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In addition to being the largest single machine in the World, the LHC is also one of the most mathematically demanding when it comes to analysing its results. This machine creates about 15 petabytes of data annually and when it was seeking out the Higgs Boson the LHC accumulated about 200 petabytes of data from the 800 trillion collisions it induced.

As I petabyte equals 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes we are talking about computational analysis that requires humongous quantities of number crunching.

One of the mysteries of the Universe that CERN scientists are currently researching is the phenomenon of dark matter. This possibly has five times the mass of visible matter in the Universe and experiments at CERN are analysing the structure of the matter and the relationship between its fundamental particles. Part of this process involves accelerating particles to the speed of light and then making them crash into each other. This creates new particles whose properties can be reconstructed with various detectors.

Dr. Manfred Krammer, head of the Experimental Physics Department at CERN, explained: “To make new advances in these areas, we need a new generation of particle sensors. Cooperation with high-tech companies like Infineon allows us to develop the technologies we need for that.”

Two of the Colliders for which the use of the Infineon sensor chips are now being tested are named ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid). When particles penetrate the silicon detectors it registers them. Both Colliders are located 100 metres underground and have been in almost permanent operation for many years carrying out an astonishing 40 million individual experiments each second.

Down to Earth

But these experiments are not all about finding out whether Deep Thought got it right about the Universe. There are more down to Earth benefits.

The technology developed for CERN could end up helping cancer patients in less than ten years time. Several groups of researchers are currently testing proton computed tomography.

This medical imaging procedure is based on the same fundamentals as the chip technology for CERN. Large silicon detectors like the ones Infineon and HEPHY are developing could supply tomographic images during radiation treatment. This would far more accurately determine the position of the tumor which means less radiation damage would be incurred by healthy tissue. It is predicted to reduce the radiation load that patients would endure by a factor of 40.