Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicists said that they have developed a tabletop particle detector which is capable of identifying even a single electron. According to the researchers, the particle detector uses magnets to trap electrons emitted by decay of the radioactive gas. Those electrons are trapped in a magnetic bottle, allowing an antenna to identify the slight signals given off by the electrons.

Researchers said in a report on their work in Physical Review Letters that the activity demonstrated a characteristic pattern. When the electrons are emitted by gas, they start vibrating at a particular baseline frequency that can spike when an electron collides with an atom of radioactive gas.

While talking about the new detector, Joe Formaggio, physics Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the process of an electron colliding with a number of atoms of radioactive gas displays frequency jumps which shows a step-like pattern.

Formaggio said, “We can literally image the frequency of the electron, and we see this electron suddenly pop into our radio antenna. Over time, the frequency changes, and actually chirps up. So these electrons are chirping in radio waves”.

The development by the researchers could be a major step towards a long-sought goal of physics determining the mass of a neutrino, according to the professor. Neutrinos are subatomic particles that are hard to detect. It is because the elementary particle doesn’t interact with standard matter.

In the development of the new detector, the MIT researchers worked with researchers at the University of Washington, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of California, Santa Barbara. During the experiment, they tracked and recorded activity of over 100,000 individual electrons that were emitted by decaying krypton gas.

According to Formaggio, the researchers have the mass cornered, but they have not measured it yet.