Jones wins international award for development of instrumentation in particle physics research

Friday, Feb 21, 2025 • Greg Pederson :

A physicist at The University of Texas at Arlington is the recipient of an international award for his role in advancing the development of instruments which scientists use in the study of particle physics.

Ben Jones, associate professor of physics, is the winner of the 2025 International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) Early Career Researcher Instrumentation Award. The award is presented by the ICFA Instrumentation Innovation and Development Panel, which encourages involvement in the innovation and development of new instrumentation for experiments at future accelerators.

He is receiving the award for his outstanding contributions to neutrino physics and detectors using noble gases and for enabling barium ion transport and identification in high-pressure xenon TPCs, according to the ICFA awards committee.

Jones received the award February 21 at the 2025 Vienna Conference on Instrumentation in Vienna, Austria, where he also delivered a talk. The award recognizes achievements in instrumentation made at an early career stage by an individual or group leading to impactful advances in the field of particle physics.

Jones is an associate director of the UTA Center for High Energy and Nuclear Physics and is co-director of the UTA Center for Advanced Detector Technology. His research group at UTA, Neutrinos and Rare Event Searches, works at the cutting edge of neutrino physics and uses tools from nuclear physics, ionic and atomic beams, super-resolution microscopy, quantum computing, materials science, machine learning, and other areas to explain properties of the neutrino that were previously unknown.

“Our goal at the Center for Advanced Detector Technologies is to realize transformative new detection methods using techniques from beyond the traditional boundaries of particle and nuclear physics,” Jones said. “I am honored to be recognized by ICFA for leading this research. 

“I also want to highlight the crucial efforts of our team of talented UTA graduate students and undergraduate researchers, whose work has enabled these advances — thank you for your commitment, and for having the courage to step into the unknown to pursue these difficult yet impactful research questions with me. I consider this award to be a recognition of the achievements of the whole team, and I hope you will consider it so, as well.”

Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are extremely abundant in the universe and have almost no mass. They are challenging to study because they have vanishingly weak interactions with ordinary matter, so much so that trillions of neutrinos pass harmlessly through the human body and other matter every second. The neutrino properties sought by Jones and his team are expected to illuminate the mechanism by which matter was generated in the early Universe, as well as providing insight into fundamental physics at ultra-short distances

“This is a tremendous and well-deserved honor for Dr. Jones,” said Alex Weiss, professor and chair of the UTA Department of Physics. “He’s doing very important research here at UTA, assisted by graduate and undergraduate students for whom he serves as an excellent mentor. It’s work that could lead to important discoveries and could enhance our understanding of the origins of the Universe.”

Jones’s current projects center on understanding the origin of neutrino mass through application of fluorescence microscopy as part of the NEXT program, a technique that the group has recently published in Nature Communications, and production and optical characterization of cold atomic tritium sources to weigh the neutrino as part of the Project 8 experiment; this work was recently published on arXiv. Both efforts are supported by the Nuclear Physics sub-program of the U.S. Department of Energy.

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