Particle-physics technology meets the eye

The retina is the layered, paper-thin “wallpaper” on the back of the eye that senses incoming light using the rods and cones of the input layer and then electrically encodes that information in the middle layers. The output layer of the retina has ganglion cells (about 1 for every 100 rods and cones) to gather and collate the encoded electrical signals and send them through the optic nerve to the brain. Although about 22 different morphological types of retinal ganglions are currently known to exist in primates, biologists know in detail how only a handful of them respond to visual images. Enter Alan Litke (University of California, Santa Cruz) and his familiarity with the silicon-microstrip detector technology used in experiments at SLAC and CERN. Along with circuit designer Władysław Dabrowski (AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland) and other colleagues, Litke developed a detector array (see the figure)...