Technology originally developed for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and then flown in space by ESA is now being used to analyze historic artworks, helping to detect forgeries.
“The art market is a jungle—some say that around 50 percent of art
Technology originally developed for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and then flown in space by ESA is now being used to analyze historic artworks, helping to detect forgeries.
“The art market is a jungle—some say that around 50 percent of art pieces and paintings are either fakes or are incorrectly attributed,” explains Josef Uher, chief technology officer of Czech company InsightART. “This has huge consequences for the value of such artworks.”
The young company – based in ESA’s Business Incubation Centre Czech Republic in Prague—is making novel use of a powerful radiation sensing device called Timepix.
The chip’s origin goes back to deep underneath the Swiss-French border: CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, needed a detector with sufficient sensitivity and dynamic range to gather snapshots of what would be coming from the Large Hadron Collider when it became operational.
Subsequently a collaboration called Medipix was established to transfer the technology beyond the high-energy physics field. Timepix went on to reach space aboard the International Space Station and ESA’s Earth-observing Proba-V.
Timepix uses a 256 x 256-pixel silicon sensor. The key to its effectiveness is that each p