Stefan Schoppmann from the PRISMA Detector Laboratory receives ICFA Early Career Instrumentation Award
06.02.2025
Dr. Stefan Schoppmann, a particle physicist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), has received the ICFA Early Career Instrumentation Award. With this, the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA), which includes leading accelerator laboratories such as CERN, recognizes outstanding contributions to instrumentation development in particle physics.
Schoppmann, who is a Detector Innovation Fellow at the PRISMA++ Cluster of Excellence’s detector laboratory, received the award for his work on the development of novel detector technologies and materials. These enable precise measurements of difficult-to-detect particles and thus contribute to research into fundamental properties of the universe.
“The so-called Standard Model of particle physics describes many fundamental phenomena in nature,” says the physicist and mathematician. “However, key questions remain unanswered, such as the existence of dark matter. Addressing these questions requires extremely precise measurements and highly sensitive detectors.”
Highly sensitive detectors for rare particles
Schoppmann is developing such technologies at the PRISMA++ Cluster of Excellence, a research association of the JGU Institute of Physics, the JGU Institute of Nuclear Physics, and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz, particularly in the PRISMA detector laboratory. One focus of his work is on measurement methods for neutrinos – elementary particles that interact only very weakly with matter and are therefore particularly difficult to detect experimentally. In order to be able to measure their properties precisely, Schoppmann has developed a new class of particularly sensitive detector materials – so-called hybrid and opaque scintillators.
“Scintillators are materials that produce light when particles pass through them,” he explains. “In these novel, whitish, strongly scattering scintillating liquids, the generated light remains spatially confined within the material. This allows particle events to be localized more precisely and distinguished more clearly from one another.”
According to the ICFA jury, Schoppmann’s pioneering work on scintillator technologies has significantly advanced neutrino and dark matter detectors through innovative experimental concepts and materials. The jury also emphasized his leading role in the development of a new generation of detector instrumentation with low noise and low background.
Schoppmann’s innovative technologies are used in two globally unique research projects at the PRISMA++ cluster in Mainz. The NuDoubt++ experiment, which he leads, is investigating neutrino physics processes – such as special forms of double beta decay, which place particularly high demands on detector technology. The novel scintillators could help to answer fundamental questions – such as whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles and what role they played in the creation of the matter-antimatter imbalance after the Big Bang.
Search for dark matter
The second project, DarkMESA, focuses on the experimental search for dark matter. The intense electron beam of the MESA accelerator developed in Mainz generates rare processes that could point to previously unknown, weakly interacting particles. To reliably identify such signals, even the smallest sources of interference and measurement noise must be separated from the actual events. The goal is to find evidence for previously unknown dark matter particles, which are thought to make up a large fraction of the matter in the universe.
Schoppmann develops the detector components and materials required for these experiments together with colleagues at the PRISMA Detector Laboratory at JGU. As a central infrastructure for detector research within the Cluster of Excellence, the laboratory enables new measurement concepts to be tested under realistic conditions, from material development to fully functional prototypes. Testing includes detectors, optical components, and systems for electronic readout and data processing.
As an interface between basic research and technology development, the PRISMA Detector Laboratory is closely integrated into international research projects. The researchers develop detector technologies for experiments such as ATLAS at CERN and IceCube in Antarctica, as well as for underground dark matter experiments at facilities such as the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy.
The ICFA is an organization of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, to which numerous physics societies worldwide belong. Stefan Schoppmann is currently accepting the ICFA Early Career Award at an international conference on detector development in Mumbai. “I am delighted to receive this award, which recognizes the joint work of the teams of researchers, doctoral candidates and students in the NuDoubt++ and DarkMESA experiments,” says Schoppmann. “The support from the PRISMA detector laboratory was crucial for the further development of the technology.”
