Frontier Detectors for Frontier Physics: Proceedings of the 13th Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors (vol. 824)

The 13th edition of Frontier Detectors for Frontier Physics was held in La Biodola, Isola d'Elba, Italy, on May 24–30, 2015. In 36 years of activity, the Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors became a traditional gathering event for people involved in the design, construction and operation of particle detectors all over the world. The number of participants has been steadily increasing from about 100 of the first (1980) edition to more than 300. In parallel the Conference topics followed the trends of the field, in fact detectors and techniques originally developed for High Energy Physics experiments are now used in astro-particle physics, medical physics, archeological research and in countless, different fields. More than 400 contributions were submitted to the Conference: due to their high quality the choice of the 72 contributions admitted to the oral presentation represented a difficult task for the session conveners. They, with the help of the International Advisory Committee, devoted special care to offer the audience a program well balanced between progresses reports on present detectors, running or in construction, and new ideas for the future. In this spirit the first day of the Conference was mainly dedicated to the activities at LHC experiments towards the Phase II, while the rest of program was tuned on the traditional topics of detector development, with the new half-session on the application of superconductivity to high-energy physics and detector development. Poster contributions are an integral and fundamental part of the scientific program: time was given to the Conference participants to visit the poster stands and a poster review was included at the end of each related session. In addition to contributed talks, the meeting was enriched by a Round Table on “Synergies and complementarities between laboratories”, where the heads of the major particle physics laboratories presented their views on the prospects of the field. It is not possible to summarize a meeting that successfully covered a broad range of activities, from GEM and MAPS detectors to crystals for high-resolution calorimetry or PET applications, from sub-nanosecond phototubes to silicon light sensors, just to mention a few. It is worth mentioning, though, the informal atmosphere and the lively discussions, taking place both during the sessions and, thanks to the pleasant weather, in the more relaxed beach setting. Products and material from many companies active in high-tech areas (from electronics to mechanical systems, from biomedical instruments to specialized detectors for space experiments) were on display during the Conference. Several contributions to the meeting were in fact due to fruitful collaborations between universities, research laboratories, and industries. The setup is such to foster further cross-fertilization between industries and cutting-edge research. During this 13th edition three Pisa Meeting Prizes were awarded to talented young scientists active in detection techniques development and contributing, by talk or poster, to the scientific program of the Conference. The selection was made by an International Committee formed by colleagues attending the Conference. The recipients were Roberto Acciarri of Fermilab for a poster on "Experimental study of breakdown electric fields in liquid argon", Raffaella Donghia of INFN-LNF for her poster on "Time performances and irradiation tests of CsI crystals read-out by MPPC", Lars Graber of the University of Göttingen for his talk on "A 3D diamond detector for particle tracking". Two additional prizes, in memory of Prof. Glenn Knoll, were established by the publisher and the editors of Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, the Elsevier Young Scientist Awards for young scientists with at least two years of Ph.D. experience. The selection was made by the above international Committee and the recipients were Filippo Resnati of CERN and Joana Wirth of the Technische Universität München, respectively, for his talk on the "Charge transfer properties through graphene for applications in gaseous detectors", and for her poster on "CERBEROS: a tracking system for secondary pion beams at the HADES spectrometer". The Executive Board of the Frontier Detector for Frontier Physics Association dedicated, for the first time, a special Award in memory of Dr. Aldo Menzione, one of the founders of the Pisa Meeting. The Prize is intended to be awarded every three years, in coincidence with the Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors, to distinguished scientists who have contributed to the development of detector techniques with outstanding achievements. The 2015 winners, selected by the members of the Frontier Detector for Frontier Physics Association, were David R. Nygren for the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) and Fabio Sauli for the Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM). The prizes were presented by Donata Foà, Aldo’s wife, and Angelo Scribano, the president of the FDFP Association.