An excellent academic environment
“This scene depicts the primeval chaos of the universe and the origins of life,” explains Paganis enthusiastically, pointing to the ceiling decoration in a relaxation space he has led us to, his eyes shining with reverence and admiration for the universe and life. After gaining his doctorate in particle physics at the University of Texas at Austin in 1999, Paganis went on to do research work at Columbia University in New York and then at the University of Wisconsin‡Madison. In 2005 he moved to the University of Sheffield in the UK, where he progressed from lecturer to professor, and over the course of almost a decade of teaching and research work his academic achievements also rose to a new level.
“Taiwan has an excellent academic research environment.” In 2014, Paganis made a major decision, choosing to move his whole family to his wife’s homeland of Taiwan. Beside his teaching duties in the Department of Physics at National Taiwan University (NTU), he heads up the school’s Particle Physics and Particle Astrophysics group (PPPA), which was newly established after his appointment.
Leading us into a laboratory in NTU’s Astronomy‡Mathematics Building, Paganis points out a high-tech precision instrument and tells us, “The Higgs boson—also known as the ‘God particle’—was detected at CERN in 2012 using a detector like this.” The discovery of the Higgs boson marked a major milestone in the world of physics. With funding from the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), a group of prestigious Taiwanese institutes including Academia Sinica, NTU, National Central University and National Cheng Kung University constructed Taiwan’s first prototype of a similar detector, with all of its components manufactured in Taiwan. The Taiwan Silicon Detector Facility (TSiDF) began operating in March 2019, and in January 2021, under the guidance of MOST, the participating teams together formed the Taiwan Instrumentation and Detector Consortium (TIDC).
After visiting the TSiDF, leading scientists from many countries expressed the hope that it could provide a manufacturing base for particle tracking detectors for the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment (sPHENIX) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the USA.
As the initiator of the program, Paganis states that after being designated by the world’s most outstanding experimental team—the one running the CMS experiment at CERN—as a manufacturing center for the next generation of calorimetric particle imaging detectors, the TSiDF will supply 5000 sensor modules, and will set up a complete production process for core detector components, all of which will be done in Taiwan. This is a proud event in the history of Taiwanese science and technology, and is a shared achievement of the Taiwanese teams.
In 2003 Paganis entered CERN, which is headquartered in Switzerland, to work on the ATLAS experiment (ATLAS: “A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS”), one of the four main particle detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. In 2014 he joined the CMS experiment, and became deputy chair of the High-Granularity Calorimeter (HGCal) project institution board. His holding this position in an organization involving more than 60 academic institutions around the world was undoubtedly a bridge enabling him to come into contact with Taiwan’s academic community and cutting-edge technology.
A postgraduate student holds a six-inch HGCal sensor module as he discusses an issue with Stathes Paganis (left).