Universal Cosmic Ray Detection with CREDO

CI: – Dr. A. Duffy

We are constantly bombarded by high energy particles from space, known as cosmic rays, originating in exploding stars or feeding black holes, and when they strike the atmosphere, they cause a shower of charged particles that we can detect using the CCDs of smartphones. This means everyone has a cosmic ray detector in their pocket, and that led to the beguilingly simple idea for the global project CREDO, to correlate the detections of cosmic rays using a simple app on the smartphones of citizen scientists all over the world. A potential source of such events, detectable only on a global scale, are from self-annihilating superheavy dark matter models, offering a chance for the community to be involved for the hunt for dark matter itself.
Currently only supported on Android smartphones, the previous ADACS 2020A round developed a version of the CREDO app in Flutter that could be ported easily to all operating systems. This work demonstrated a functioning prototype, but that was not yet at a stage to deploy. This request is to finish that work, creating a deployable app to iOS Appstore – ensuring citizen scientists with all devices can join the existing 11570 users worldwide who have collected 3.28M cosmic ray events already. We estimate 9 weeks of further developer time is required due to the ADACS knowledge gained internally through the 2020A round. However, even those only a prototype demonstrator app resulted from the previous ADACS effort, it has seen the ADCAS developers invited as co-authors for two publications, and commitments from the global CREDO team’s time to support the role out and long-term support of the Flutter-based unified CREDO app that is the subject of this request.