Shion Kubota

The current objective in particle physics research is shifting from "discovery" to "high-precision observations," requiring new technology that can accurately capture even microscopic signals, as well as offer the ability to manage vast amounts of information. ‘Q-Pix’ is a type of electron detection technology developed by a research team helmed by Shion Kubota at Harvard University and the University of Manchester. Q-Pix combines a proprietary electronic circuit based on the least action principle together with an innovative way of quantizing information to make it possible to search for neutrinos with energy levels so low that detection was previously considered impossible.

Existing technology for measuring electric charges generated by reactions between atoms and neutrino particles uses units of time to measure each electric charge and records electric currents as waveforms. This leads to the problem of data volume increasing exponentially whenever the detector is expanded or the threshold for measuring energy is lowered. To overcome this issue, Q-Pix continuously observes and accumulates electric charges, logging the time according to the circuit’s built-in clock only when it crosses over a certain threshold. Based on this mathematically discrete log, the data is processed as quantum information using the time it takes to build up to a fixed amount of charge, achieving electron detection with 100 times more precision while requiring only one millionth the amount of data volume compared to existing technologies.

As the chief member of the Q-Pix research project, Kubota has led the way to simulating low-energy neutrino observations from supernovae and the Sun, as well the operational tests of prototypes and data analysis. She was the lead author of a research paper published in 2022, in which she demonstrated that Q-Pix makes it possible to observe supernova neutrinos in the world's largest neutrino experiment, "DUNE."

Q-Pix is primarily intended to be used in particle experiments at the moment, but the electric charge detection that Q-Pix targets is widely used in a range of IoT technologies, environmental monitoring, medical physics, and more. Putting Q-Pix to use is expected to improve the precision and sensitivity of these measurement technologies, and there are plans to pour more research into these moving forward into the future.