Niger's special forces prepare to fight Boko Haram in Diffa, March 26, 2015. | Source: VOA via Wikimedia
It was in the 2000s that Nigeria first faced the threat of Boko Haram, the affiliate of Islamic State in Africa. As President Muhammadu Buhari completes five years of being in power, which he got primarily for his plank of defeating Boko Haram, the battle still continues.
Buhari won the presidential election in 2015 against then President Goodluck Jonathan by touting his military background as an asset in defeating Boko Haram, which his predecessor was not able to do. While in his first few months as President he did show results by pushing Boko Haram out of some territories, the Nigerian military was unable to maintain the momentum as Boko Haram struck back with new tactics.
There is widespread distrust towards government officials and Buhari’s popularity has also eroded massively. The citizens are making their dissatisfaction known through anti government demonstrations. Meanwhile the administration seems busy playing blame games and guessing at where things are going wrong in the military’s efforts to contain the violence.
In June 2020, Nigeria saw one of its deadliest attacks in recent times, a hard turn from claims by the military in April that a Boko Haram leader appeared ready to surrender “based on body language.”
Boko Haram which means "Western education is prohibited" in the local Hausa dialect, first began in 2002 under Muhammad Yusuf. They called shunning the western influence in the social sphere and called for the enforcement of sharia even among non-Muslims. Its leader Mohammad Yusuf was killed in police custody in 2009. However the government authorities failed to utilise this opportunity and showed slackness in rehabilitating the group members, who moved underground, regrouped under new leadership, and continuing to terrorise even larger areas.
Many factors have been considered in piecing together what led to the creation of Boko Haram and how its existence has been sustained, ranging from support from ISIS, ability to internationalize as a group, and possible assistance from Libya.
The US and Europe have been seen as reluctant to extend any real aid, perhaps due to Nigeria’s oil reserves and a desire to keep African countries destabilised to maintain their neo-colonial stronghold in the region. Internally, corruption and laxity in action of troops has often been cited as big hurdles in controlling the situation.
Two Boko Haram vehicles destroyed. | Source: M. Kindzeka via Wikimedia
As for solutions, many have turned their focus towards rebuilding communities in the aftermath of thousands of people being murdered and displaced due to the ongoing violence. Not just civilian casualties, but a disastrous lack of necessities such as food, water and electricity is leading to a humanitarian crisis in the area falling in the conflict zone between Boko Haram and the military.
President Buhari currently seems slow to admit that Boko Haram cannot be “defeated on the battlefield alone.” Apart from improving the military’s response he must also take measures for alleviating poverty, destroying corruption and ‘de-radicalisation’ of those recruited into Boko Haram.
Some localised efforts are being taken to stabilise the situation by empowering communities to resolve conflicts, improving civil infrastructure, and reintegrating reformed militants.
However, localised efforts are short-term in nature, and their stability and success is greatly determined by the government which understands that more than killing the attackers, trust and active participation of its citizens is needed to resolve this conflict
The impact of Boko Haram on the people of Nigeria has been multifold, and the arsenal to ‘defeat’ Boko Haram must be expanded and redefined.
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Detecting The Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays With Smartphones
Smartphones have become the most commonplace objects in our daily lives. The unimaginable power that we hold in our hands is unrealized by most of us and, more importantly, untapped. Its creativity often gets misused but one can only hope that it’s fascinating abilities would be utilized. For example, did you know that the millions of phones around the globe can be connected to form a particle detector? The following article covers the CRAYFIS (Cosmic RAYs Found in Smartphones) phone-based application developed by the physicists from the University of California—Daniel Whiteson, Michael Mulhearn, and their team. CRAYFIS aims to take advantage of the large network of smartphones around the world and detect the cosmic or gamma rays bursts which enter the Earth’s atmosphere almost constantly.
What Are Cosmic Rays?
Cosmic rays are high velocity subatomic particles bombarding the Earth’s upper atmosphere continuously. Cosmic ray bursts have the highest energy compared to all forms of electro-magnetic radiation. When we say ultra-high energy particles (energy more than 10<sup>18</sup> eV), we mean two million times more energetic than the ones that can be produced by the particle colliders on Earth. These rays are thought to be more powerful than typical supernovae and can release trillions of times more energy than the Sun. They are also highly unpredictable as they can enter Earth’s atmosphere from any direction and the bursts can last for any period of time ranging from a few thousand seconds to several minutes.
Despite many theoretical hypotheses, the sources of these ultra-high energy cosmic rays are still a mystery to us even after many decades of their discovery. These rays were initially discovered in the 1960’s by the U.S. military when they were doing background checks for gamma rays after nuclear weapon testing. Cosmologists suggest that these bursts could be the result of super massive stars collapsing - leading to hypernova; or can be retraced to collisions of black holes with other black holes or neutron stars.
How Do We Detect Them?
When the high-energy particles collide with the Earth’s atmosphere, the air and the gas molecules cause them to break apart and create massive showers of relatively low-energy particles. Aurora borealis i.e., the Northern and the Southern lights are the lights that are emitted when these cosmic rays interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. Currently, these particles are hitting the Earth at a rate of about one per square meter per second. The showers get scattered to a radius of one or two kilometers consisting mostly of high-energy photons, electrons, positrons and muons. But the fact that these particles can hit the Earth anytime and anywhere is where the problem arises. Since the Earth has a massive area, it is not possible to place a detector everywhere and catch them at the exact moment.
Energetic charged particles known as cosmic rays hit our atmosphere, where they collide with air molecules to produce a shower of secondary particle | Source: CERN
Detecting such a shower requires a very big telescope, which logically means a network of individual particle detectors distributed over a mile or two-wide radius and connected to each other. The Pierre Auger Observatory in South America is the only such arrangement where 1,600 particle detectors have been scattered on 3,000 square kilometers of land. But the construction cost of the same was about $100 million. Yet, only a few cosmic ray particles could be detected using this arrangement. How do we spread this network around the Earth?
In addition to being cost-effective, such a setup must also be feasible. The Earth’s surface cannot possibly be dotted with particle detectors which cost huge fortunes. This is where smartphones come into the picture.
Detecting The Particles Using Smartphones
Smartphones are the most appropriate devices required to solve the problem. They have planet wide coverage, are affordable by most people and are being actively used by more than 1.5 billion users around the planet. Individually, these devices are low and inefficient; but a considerably dense network of such devices can give us a chance to detect cosmic ray showers belonging to the highest energy range.
Previous research has shown that smartphones have the capability of detecting ionizing radiation. The camera is the most sensitive part of the smartphone and is just the device required to meet our expectations. A CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) device is present in the camera- in which silicon photodiode pixels produce electron-hole pairs when struck by visible photons (when photons are detected by the CMOS device, it leaves traces of weakly activated pixels). The incoming rays are also laced with other noises and interference from the surroundings. Although these devices are made to detect visible light, they still have the capability of detecting higher-energy photons and also low-ionizing particles such as the muons.
A screenshot from the app which shows the exposure time, the events- the number of particles recorded and other properties
To avoid normal light, the CRAYFIS application is to be run during nighttime with the camera facing down. As the phone processor runs the application it collects data from its surroundings using a camera as its detector element. The megapixel images (i.e., the incoming particles) are scanned at a speed of 5 to 15 frames per second, depending on the frame-processing speed of the device. Scientists expect that signals from the cosmic rays would occur rarely, i.e., around one in 500 frames. Also, there is the job of removing background data. An algorithm was created to tune the incoming particle shower by setting a threshold frequency at around 0.1 frames per second. Frames containing pixels above the threshold are stored and passed to the second stage which examines the stored frames, saving only the pixels above a second, lower threshold.
The CRAYFIS app is designed to run when the phone is not being used and when it is connected to a power source. The actual performance would be widely affected by the geometry of the smartphone’s camera and the conditions in which the data is being collected. Further, once the application is installed and is in the operating mode, no participation is required from the user, which is required to achieve wide-scale participation. When a Wifi connection is available the collected data would be uploaded to the central server so that it could be interpreted.
There is much complicated math used to trace back the information collected from the application. The most important parameters for the app are the local density of incoming particles, the detection area of the phone and the particle identification efficiency. These parameters are used to find the mean number of candidates (photons or muons) being detected. Further, the probability that a phone will detect no candidates or the probability that a phone will detect one or more candidates is given by Poisson distribution. The density of the shower is directly proportional to the incident particle energy with a distribution in x and y sensitive to the direction in which the particle came from. An Unbinned Likelihood (it is the probability of obtaining a certain data- in this case the distribution of the cosmic rays including their energy and direction, the obtained data is arranged into bins which are very, very small) analysis is used to determine the incident particle energy and direction. To eliminate background interference, a benchmark requirement has been set that at least 5 phones must detect and register a hit to be considered as a candidate.
It is impossible to express just how mind-blowing this innovation is. As the days pass, Science and Technology around us keep on surprising us and challenge us to rack our brains for more and more unique ways to deal with complex problems. The CRAYFIS app is simply beautiful and it would be a dream-come-true to the scientists if the project works out and we are able to detect these high energy, super intimidating cosmic rays with smartphones from our backyard.
Further Reading
The paper by Daniel Whiteson and team can be found here.
An exciting book “We Have No Idea” by Daniel Whiteson and cartoonist Jorge Cham can be found here.
