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 innovative research ideas that might not otherwise receive long-term support from traditional funding sources.
"It is a tremendous honor to be recognized and supported by the Moore Foundation," Dr. Jones said. "I know several Moore recipients, and they are among the best physicists working in the field today. I 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 UTA's Center for Advanced Detector Technologies, studies neutrino physics. His group focuses on the nature and size of the neutrino's mass, barium tagging for neutrinoless double beta decay, and searches for phenomena such as oscillations of sterile neutrinos.
With the Moore Foundation funding, Jones will apply single-molecule fluorescence imaging techniques his lab developed for barium tagging as part of the NEXT (Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC) project to search for another rare process, neutrinoless double electron capture. This phenomenon can occur only if the neutrino is its own antiparticle, this time in argon or krypton gases.
"Resolving the quantum nature of the neutrino is one of the most challenging open problems in experimental physics today," Jones said. "Traditional techniques of particle physics seem to be running out of road. Our group brings interdisciplinary tools from atomic, molecular and optical physics, in collaboration with chemists at UTA, to make progress on this challenge. The project supported by the Moore Foundation will open the next chapter in this research."
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Earlier this year, Jones received the 2025 International Committee for Future Accelerators Early Career Researcher Instrumentation Award for advancing the development of instruments used in particle physics. He has contributed to major international experiments including NEXT, Project 8—which seeks to measure the neutrino's mass—and the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory, which detects neutrinos in Antarctic ice.
Since joining UTA in 2016, Jones has secured more than $5 million in federal research grants from the Department of Energy and authored over 450 research papers with 13,000 citations. His latest publication, featured in Physical Review Letters, is titled "Superradiant Neutrino Lasers from Radioactive Condensates" and proposes a laser that could emit bursts of neutrinos instead of light—potentially offering a new way to study the "ghost particle."
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The Moore Foundation launched the Experimental Physics Investigators initiative in 2022 to support 120 scientists over six cohorts, with more than $77 million awarded to date. The program emphasizes collaborative environments that welcome all students and promote effective research teams.
"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 who are pushing the boundaries of our understanding of the universe."
