Early Career ICFA Award: Dr. Kostas Mavrokoridis
Dr. Kostas Mavrokoridis has been awarded the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) instrumentation early career award. The award was presented to Kostas at the 2023 Technology and Instrumentation in Particle Physics (TIPP) conference, held in Cape town, South Africa.
The award “…recognizes achievements in instrumentation made at an early career stage by an individual, or group of individuals, that has the promise to make, or has already made, an advance in the field of particle physics”. Kostas was awarded the prize for his work on the liquid argon detectors that he has developed in Liverpool, and specifically “… the development of an innovative 3D optical readout for liquid argon time projection chambers that use novel glass thick GEMS (THGEMs) coupled to very fast Timepix cameras to provide high-granularity images and low-energy thresholds.”
https://icfa-iid.physics.ox.ac.uk
The technology developed within the ARIADNE programme provides particle identification, high energy resolution, low noise at room temperatures and sensitivity to lower energy liquid argon interactions. Additionally, the new readout approach addresses challenges of scale-up to kton scale detectors. With successful large-scale demonstrations already carried out during two expeditions to CERN, the technology is now under consideration for a future 10-kton neutrino far detector within the DUNE programme. LAr detectors are pivotal for Neutrino physics studies which will enable discovery of physics beyond the Standard Model; these detectors will hold the key to our understanding of phenomena such as dark matter and the matter antimatter asymmetry of our Universe. The elegant and sophisticated ARIADNE optical readout technologies have the potential to extend the scientific reach and discovery potential of the planned DUNE far detectors.
Congratulations to Kostas on this wonderful award.