Jones named to prestigious cohort of Experimental Physics Investigators

Wednesday, Oct 08, 2025 • Greg Pederson :

Ben Jones, associate professor of physics at The University of Texas at Arlington, has been named to the 2025 cohort of Experimental Physics Investigators, a distinguished group of mid-career researchers pushing the boundaries of experimental physics.

The award, sponsored by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, provides $1.3 million in funding over five years to each of the 22 members of the new cohort. The grants allow scientists to pursue new research ideas which might not otherwise attract such a level and duration of support from traditional funding sources, according to the foundation’s website.

“It is a tremendous honor to be recognized and supported by the Moore Foundation,” Jones said. “I know several Moore recipients, and they are among the best physicists working in the field today. I very much look forward to working with the Foundation to pursue this exciting and ambitious project at the interface of nuclear physics and chemical sensing.”

Jones, co-director of the UTA Center for Advanced Detector Technologies, and his research group at UTA study neutrino physics. Areas of focus include the nature and size of the mass of the neutrino particle, development of barium tagging for neutrinoless double beta decay, and searches for phenomena such as oscillations of sterile neutrinos.

With the Moore Foundation funding, Jones will use single molecule fluorescence imaging techniques he and his lab developed for barium tagging as part of the NEXT project to search for a different type of rare radioactive decay, called neutrinoless double electron capture. This is another kind of process that can only happen if the neutrino is its own antiparticle, this time in argon or krypton gases, Jones said.

NEXT (Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC) is a collaboration created to search for a hypothetical nuclear process called neutrinoless double-beta decay. Experiments seeking to identify this process aim to determine whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles and, if so, provide a means to determine the mass of the neutrino involved.

“Resolving the quantum nature of the neutrino is one of the most challenging open problems in experimental physics today,” Jones said. The traditional techniques of particle physics seem to be running out of road, in terms of their capability to make progress on this question. Our group brings interdisciplinary new tools from atomic, molecular and optical physics, in a collaboration between physicists and chemists at UTA, to make progress on this challenge.

“The project supported by the Moore Foundation will open the next chapter in this research, expanding our scope to search for previously near-invisible neutrinoless double electron capture process.”

Earlier this year, Jones received the 2025 International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) Early Career Researcher Instrumentation Award for his role in advancing the development of instruments used in the study of particle physics. He has been heavily involved in major international particle experiments including NEXT, Project 8, and IceCube. The goal of Project 8 is to measure the mass of the neutrino. The IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory searches for neutrinos via a detector embedded in the Antarctic ice.

Since joining UTA in 2016, Jones’ research has received more than $5 million in federal research grants from the Department of Energy. He has also authored more than 450 research papers, receiving a cumulative 13,000 citations.

His latest publication, featured in the September issue of Physical Review Letters, is titled “Superradiant Neutrino Lasers from Radioactive Condensates” and proposes a new type of laser that could emit bursts of neutrinos instead of light. The idea is made possible through superradiance, a phenomenon in which a group of atoms collectively emits light in a burst rather than in small doses. Jones and co-author Joseph Formaggio of MIT theorized that given the right conditions, superradiance could produce a neutrino burst. If a neutrino laser were created, it could lead to new ways of studying what is referred to as the “ghost particle”.

The Moore Foundation created the Experimental Physics Investigators initiative in 2022. It is intended to eventually support 120 scientists over six cohorts and the program has awarded more than $77 million in funding to date. Cultivating collaborative research environments that welcome all students and promote highly effective research teams is a goal of the initiative.

“We once again received proposals from amazing mid-career investigators who are taking their research to new levels,” said Theodore Hodapp, program director for the initiative. “We are excited to see them join our existing cohorts of experimental physicists who are pushing the boundaries of our understanding of the universe.”

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation was established by the Intel co-founder and his wife in 2000 to support scientific discovery, environmental conservation, patient care improvements as well as the preservation of the character of the San Francisco Bay Area.

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