Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

Benjamin J.P. Jones
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Citation:

"For his thesis entitled,“Sterile Neutrinos in Cold Climates.”"

Background:

Ben Jones is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He works on searches for new physics at the IceCube neutrino observatory, and on high pressure xenon gas detectors for neutrinoless double beta decay with the NEXT collaboration. Jones received his undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University in 2008, and his PhD in neutrino physics from MIT in 2015. His thesis research was performed under the supervision of Janet Conrad and focused on three topics: (1) development and construction of the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber, including characterization and installation of the optical system and high voltage TPC surge protection systems, implementation of the Bo optical test stand at Fermilab, and measurements of contamination effects in liquid argon; (2) theoretical studies of neutrino coherence properties using a novel dynamical collapse approach; (3) searches for eV-scale sterile neutrino oscillations using the IceCube detector, which would drive resonant active-to-sterile transitions near the peak of IceCube’s multi-TeV atmospheric neutrino sample. The non-observation of these effects provided the world’s strongest limits on the sterile neutrino mixing angle theta_24. Jones has received the Siddans Prize for Physics (Selwyn College, Cambridge, 2008) and the Martin Deutsch Award for Excellence in Experimental Particle Physics (MIT, 2015)