A sensor can watch hundreds of tiny particles at the same time. It could make cars, navigation, and even dark matter detection much more accurate.
Accurate sensing is critical for autonomous vehicles, navigation systems, environmental monitoring, and fundamental physics research, but current sensors face a persistent limitation. They can either track a single particle quickly or monitor many particles slowly, creating a trade-off that restricts both speed and precision.
Researchers at King’s College London have developed a new sensor design to address this challenge. It levitates numerous glass microparticles in a vacuum, allowing precise control and tracking of multiple particles simultaneously. A camera modeled after the human eye enables monitoring of over 100 suspended particles at once, potentially creating one of the most sensitive sensors developed so far.
The system uses neuromorphic, brain-inspired vision technology that captures only the motion of particles instead of full video frames, reducing data collection while preserving essential information. An integrated AI algorithm tracks each particle individually and as part of a cloud, determining the forces acting on them. Real-time feedback controls particle motion, reduces energy, and stabilizes movement through cooling.
By isolating and controlling many particles at once, the design enables measurement of extremely weak forces. This capability opens applications in detecting gravitational waves, dark matter, and subtle environmental changes. Its low energy requirements also make scaling onto chips feasible within the next five to ten years, enabling high-precision sensors for consumer electronics, robotics, and other systems that rely on precise positional tracking or gas sensing.
Future developments could cool particles to below a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero, eliminating thermal noise and vibrations. Such advances would produce quantum sensors with accuracy and sensitivity far beyond current classical devices, allowing detection of forces previously impossible to measure.
This innovation resolves the long-standing dilemma of choosing between speed and scale in particle-based sensing, offering a path to next-generation sensor technology for both practical applications and fundamental scientific research.
