UC Santa Cruz Physicists Receive Prestigious International Award for Revolutionary Detector Technology
Committee on Future Accelerators honors ultra-fast silicon detectors that enable 4D particle tracking
SANTA CRUZ, CA – February 12, 2026 – The International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) has awarded its 2026 Instrumentation Award to UC Santa Cruz physicists Hartmut Sadrozinski and Abraham Seiden, along with UCSC research associate Nicolò Cartiglia, also at INFN Torino, Italy. The award recognizes the development of ultra-fast silicon detectors (UFSD) with intrinsic gain for precision tracking. The technology from the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) has been widely adopted in the particle physics community, enabling revolutionary 4D tracking detectors that measure both position and time of particle collisions.
The innovation known as AC-LGAD (AC-coupled Low-Gain Avalanche Detector) represents a significant improvement in temporal and spatial resolution compared to previous detector technologies. These ultra-fast silicon detectors can measure particle passages with precision below 20 picoseconds and 10 micrometer, combining the crucial dimension of time and space with a previously unknown precision. This breakthrough has enabled major detector upgrades at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, including the MIP Timing Detector in the CMS experiment and the High Granularity Timing Detector in ATLAS. The technology is also being implemented in the ePIC detector at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Electron-Ion Collider and in smaller experiments, including the PIONEER nuclear physics experiment being developed at UC Santa Cruz.
“The precise locations of particles in space and time are crucial parts of medical physics and radiotherapy,” explained Sadrozinski. “UFSD is emerging as cutting-edge technology to improve the accuracy in beam monitoring and dosimetry, thus limiting radiation exposure of the patient. The segmentation of UFSD will benefit medical imaging by providing the high granularity needed for CT and PET to improve image contrast and detail.”
From top to bottom: Nicolò Cartiglia, Hartmut Sadrozinski and Abe Seiden
The award represents the culmination of more than four decades of semiconductor detector research. Sadrozinski and Seiden established the SCIPP Semiconductor Laboratory in the mid-1980s, pioneering silicon detector development for high-energy particle accelerators with students like Cartiglia. The physics breakthrough came in 2012 when the team discovered that making silicon detectors thinner dramatically improved their timing resolution by shortening signal collection time. Systematic laboratory testing and beam tests validated the approach, leading to the term Ultra-Fast Silicon Detector. The team’s innovations earned them a U.S. Patent for “Segmented AC-coupled readout from continuous collection electrodes in semiconductor sensors” in 2017, and UC Santa Cruz recognized the achievement with its Inventor Recognition Program Award the same year.
Seiden said, “I want to recognize the wonderful students who have worked with us on the many measurements which quantified the performance of our Ultra-Fast Silicon Detectors, as well as the technical staff in our lab who developed the electronics to read out the detectors. UCSC is a great place to study physics and work closely with faculty. Our innovative detectors are being used in two upgrades at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, to run toward the end of the decade, as well as in other future applications.”
The 2026 ICFA award was presented on Feburary 6 at the Technology and Instrumentation in Particle Physics (TIPP) conference at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, where Cartiglia delivered the award lecture on behalf of the team.
Research on ultra-fast silicon detectors has been supported by DoE and the CERN RD50 collaboration. Targeted seed funding came from the UCSC Launchpad program.
About ICFA
The International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA), a working group of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), was established in 1976 to promote international collaboration in accelerator-based high-energy physics. The ICFA Instrumentation Award honors individuals or teams (up to three people) who have made significant contributions to instrumentation in particle physics.
Media Contact
Mike Pena, (831) 459-4352, mivpena@ucsc.edu