I'm one of the leads on this project! We've been flying under the radar for a while now, since everyone working on this has a "day job" (mostly ATLAS/CMS physicists), and we have essentially no funding. But we are making progress and hope to eventually do a full-scale release and produce some science! I'll try to answer any questions in this thread.
Ha, we had this idea quite a long time ago (2008) when "apps" really started becoming a thing.
I think this works if you were in a densely populated area and a significant fraction of the population was listening, but that was always a pipe dream.<p>On a related note, when a 10^19 or above event hit a densely populated area, there's a decent sized ionization column near the center of the shower that could likely lead to cancer. Theres probably 100 to 1000 or so events like that in an area the size of the Bay Area.<p>Edit: I took out a part talking about noise after I glanced at the paper, but I would still be worried about it because the area of the detector (aka camera sensor) is roughly equivalent to the area of the electronics (ADC, CPU, Memory, etc...) in a smart phone, whereas most surface detectors have a huge scintillation footprint compared to the electronics footprint.
When it comes to detecting radiation with smartphone, it is possible / known. Two friends of mine made it as a scientific projects when they are still in high-school:
<a href="https://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2014/40/News%20Articles/1756279" rel="nofollow">https://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2014/40/News%20Arti...</a>
Have they started sending around apps to beta testers? You can sign up[0] and I'm pretty sure I did, but I haven't heard anything.<p>[0] <a href="http://crayfis.io/" rel="nofollow">http://crayfis.io/</a>
From the paper: "[UHECR air shower] can be detected via [...] radio and acoustic signatures"<p>Does this mean that the particles have so much energy you could <i>HEAR</i> the effects of them hitting the atmosphere?