Award-winning research may unlock universe’s origins

(Press-News.org) University of Texas at Arlington physicist Ben Jones has received an international honor for his contributions to developing advanced instruments used in particle physics research.

Dr. Jones, an associate professor of physics, was awarded the 2025 International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) Early Career Researcher Instrumentation Award. Presented by the ICFA Instrumentation Innovation and Development Panel, the award recognizes significant advancements in the innovation and development of new instrumentation for future accelerator experiments.

He accepted the award last week at the 2025 Vienna Conference on Instrumentation in Austria. The honor recognizes achievements in instrumentation at an early career stage that lead to impactful advances in particle physics.

Jones serves as associate director of the UTA Center for High Energy and Nuclear Physics and co-director of the UTA Center for Advanced Detector Technology. His research group, Neutrinos and Rare Event Searches, is at the forefront of neutrino physics, leveraging tools from nuclear physics, ionic and atomic beams, super-resolution microscopy, quantum computing, materials science, machine learning and other fields to uncover previously unknown neutrinos.

“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.”

Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are abundant throughout the universe and have almost no mass. They are challenging to study because they interact only vanishingly weakly with ordinary matter—so much so that trillions of them pass harmlessly through the human body and other objects every second. The properties Jones and his team are investigating could shed light on the mechanisms that generated matter in the early universe and provide insights into fundamental physics at extremely small scales.

“I also want to highlight the crucial efforts of talented UTA graduate students and undergraduate researchers, whose commitment to this work has enabled these advances,” Jones said. “I consider this award to be a recognition of the achievements of the whole team.”

Jones’ current research focuses on uncovering the origin of neutrino mass. As part of the NEXT program (Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC), his team applies fluorescence microscopy, a technique they recently published in Nature Communications. He is also involved in the production and optical characterization of cold atomic tritium sources for the Project 8 experiment, which aims to measure the neutrino’s mass. This work was recently published on arXiv. Both projects are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Physics sub-program.

“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, 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.”

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