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Comment by Nokinside | Hacker News Reader

Could physicists and astronomers use all this distributed particle detection for research?

Like a app in a phone or desktop that sends reports back with location and time information.

You may be interested to learn of arXiv:1510.07655, "Detecting particles with cell phones: the Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory" by Vandenbroucke et al.

I don't know if any novel results have come out of this kind of thing.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.07665

There was also this one, a bit earlier, "Observing Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays with Smartphones".

https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.2895

I (thought I) signed up to be informed of beta releases, but never heard anything. I just checked their website[0] and it mentions a beta app, but that seems to just go to a signup page.

[0] https://crayfis.io

Most bit flip events are apparently due to alpha particles from radioactive decay in the package (source - worked for a company which used 'low alpha compound' in some of our ICs to put off having to implement HW error correction) , which would be a big confounding signal. I imaging physics experiments work hard to avoid this, or at least correct for it.

Thus the demand for low-background steel, mostly recovered from pre-atomic-age ships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

To me, this seems like AstroTurf PR for the quoted manufacturer's Movidius™ Myriad™ 2, just tested at [hope to be trendy HEP institution].

Pity the photo with friendly smiles from the press package was left out, but the curious will find it with a brief search.

Probably not, due to the low fidelity of any data from this. "real" particle detectors can trace the decay chain, momentum changes, precise energy levels, etc. Processor cache flips etc can only say "a particle with energy >= X was here", which isn't super useful given the relative frequency of occurrence.

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