Karsten Heeger, Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, chair of the physics department, and director of Wright Lab; and his collaborators in the Daya Bay collaboration have been awarded the 2023 European Physical Society (EPS) High Energy Particle Physics (HEPP) prize.
The 2023 EPS HEPP prize was awarded “to the members of the Daya Bay and RENO collaborations for the observation of short-baseline reactor electron-antineutrino disappearance, providing the first determination of the neutrino mixing angle Θ13, which paves the way for the detection of CP violation in the lepton sector”. The collaboration shares the prize this year with Cecilia Jarlskog “for the discovery of an invariant measure of CP violation in both quark and lepton sectors”.
The EPS HEPP prize is awarded for an outstanding contribution to high energy physics in an experimental, theoretical or technological area.
Daya Bay is an international experiment led by the United States and China designed to measure the neutrino mixing angle Θ13 and to perform precision studies of antineutrino oscillation and the reactor spectrum. The experiment is located at the Daya Bay nuclear power plant near Hong Kong, China, and ended data taking in 2022.
PI Heeger and his group had responsibility in the United States for the design, construction, and installation of the antineutrino detectors and were involved in the data taking and analysis that led to the first measurement of Θ13.
A full citation of the award can be found at the link below.