UT Arlington’s Ben Jones is building tools to study elusive neutrinos—particles so ghostly, trillions pass through us every second. His award-winning work in neutrino detection is part of a global effort to understand how matter—and maybe we—exist.

This spring, the associate professor of physics at the University of Texas at Arlington was honored for his contributions to developing advanced instruments used in particle physics research. Jones received the 2025 Early Career Researcher Instrumentation Award from the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA), which recognizes innovation in designing tools for next-generation accelerator experiments.

“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.”

Jones is associate director of the UTA Center for High Energy and Nuclear Physics and co-director of the university’s Center for Advanced Detector Technology. His research group—Neutrinos and Rare Event Searches—is at the forefront of neutrino physics, applying tools from nuclear physics, atomic beams, super-resolution microscopy, quantum computing, materials science, and machine learning to study previously unknown neutrino behaviors.

“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.”

He accepted the award at the 2025 Vienna Conference on Instrumentation in Austria.

Trillions pass through us every second

Neutrinos are fundamental particles that are abundant across the universe and have almost no mass. Because they interact so weakly with matter, they’re incredibly difficult to study. In fact, trillions of them pass harmlessly through the human body every second without leaving a trace.

The properties under investigation by Jones and his team could shed light on the forces that generated matter in the early universe—and help reveal new aspects of fundamental physics at the smallest imaginable 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.”

What comes next

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 is applying fluorescence microscopy—a technique they recently published in Nature Communications—to detect rare particle events.

Jones is also involved in the production and optical characterization of cold atomic tritium sources for the Project 8 experiment, which seeks to measure the neutrino’s mass. That work was published earlier this year on arXiv, the open-access archive for scholarly research in physics and related disciplines.

Both of Jones’ projects are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Physics sub-program, UTA said earlier this year.

Quincy Preston contributed to this report.

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