Today, in Mumbai, India, during the Technology and Instrumentation in Particle Physics (TIPP) conference, Nicolò Cartiglia of the INFN Turin division, Hartmut Sadrozinski and Abraham Seiden of the University of California Santa Cruz were awarded the ICFA Instrumentation Award 2026 for “the groundbreaking development of ultra-fast silicon detectors for precision timing, now widely used in the particle physics community and enabling 4D tracking detectors”.
The prize, awarded annually by the ICFA International Committee for Future Accelerators, recognises achievements in the field of instrumentation that have led to significant advances in particle physics, such as the liquid argon technology awarded in 2022, the Micro Pattern Gas Detectors awarded in 2023 and the Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors awarded in 2024. This year, ICFA chose to highlight the technology that adds a fourth dimension, time (t), to the tracking of particles in space (x, y, z), allowing a more accurate reconstruction of events. Knowing not only where, but also when a particle has passed makes it possible to separate overlapping events, determine the velocity – and therefore the mass – of the particle, reconstruct its decays more accurately, and increase sensitivity to new and rare phenomena.
“I firmly believe that technological innovations are the key to new discoveries in the field of physics”, commented Nicolò Cartiglia, whose work has always been devoted to improving particle detectors. “I began with an innovative silicon tracker at the SCIPP laboratory in Santa Cruz, moved on to the ATLAS calorimeter at Columbia University and the crystal calorimeter for the CMS experiment at CERN during my early years at INFN, and then returned to silicon sensors. I have been committed to implementing this technology since 2010, and the ICFA recognition makes me truly proud of these years of intense and stimulating work.”
Nicolò Cartiglia is a researcher at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in the Turin division, where he has worked since 1999, after a PhD at the University of California Santa Cruz in 1994 and postdoctoral activity at Columbia University. He has always been dedicated to the design, construction and commissioning of detectors for high-energy physics experiments and, over the last 15 years, has focused on developing the time-tagging capability of silicon detectors and on designing silicon trackers capable of performing space-time tracking, the so-called 4D tracking, a development that has generated great interest within the scientific community. He has received several grants and, together with H. Sadrozinski and A. Seiden, the UCSC Inventor Recognition Program award in 2017.
