Dr Aled Horner
Postdoctoral Research Associate
School of Physical and Chemical Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
Queen Mary University of London
Member of Dr Seth Zenz's Research Group
Research
Semiconductors, Nuclear Physics, Particle Physics, Particle Detection
Interests
Currently, Aled Horner is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at QMUL working on the Inner Tracker (ITk) portion of the ATLAS experiment at CERN. This work consists of undertaking quality control (QC) testing of silicon strip detectors and their support structures, stave cores. Strip detector QC involves electrical testing as well as visual inspection and metrology, and stave core QC involves thermal tests. These tests confirm fabrication quality and resilience of these components for the high luminosity upgrade of the LHC.Aled Horner undertook his PhD with the title “Evaluating the Suitability of Organic Semiconductor Detectors for Nuclear Security” as part of the Organic Neutron Detectors sub-group of the Detector Development Group at Queen Mary University of London. This PhD, funded by AWE and NuSec, involved improvements to in-house technologies based on detection of hadronic (alpha and neutron) radiation by organic semiconducting materials. This work has led to successful world-first neutron and alpha radiation detection using novel materials involving carboranes included within the polymer backbone, the topic of proceedings for a talk given at the Vienna Conference on Instrumentation in February 2025 published in journal Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research - Section A.
