Anton Oed Prize 2026 awarded to Amos Breskin
09 Sep 2026
The Anton Oed Prize for the year 2026 has been awarded to Amos Breskin of the Weizmann Institute of Science. The ceremony took place on 4 September during the 9th International Conference on Micro-pattern Gaseous Detectors, which was held in Prague, in the Czech Republic from 31 August to 4 September.
The Anton Oed Prize is awarded biannually by the ILL to recognise active scientists who have made significant contributions to the development of micro-pattern gaseous detectors (MPGD). The prize was established in memory of Anton Oed, who invented the microstrip gas chamber (MSGC). Read more about the prize here.
Amos Breskin has been selected as the winner of the prize taking into account his career characterised by innovation and novelty. The official statement of the jury refers ”his constant drive to explore new approaches, which so often led to major innovations; his way of doing science, closely aligned with Anton Oed’s own mindset; his remarkable talent for integrating knowledge from multiple fields and technologies; his thorough understanding (or persistent pursuit of understanding) of the physics underlying every detector; and his enthusiastic openness to new ideas all made him the unanimous choice for the Anton Oed Prize of 2026.”
Declaring to be "honored and moved" by this award, Amos Breskin shared some of his memories from Anton Oed and the birth and development of MSGC:
"I was lucky to attend Anton Oed's talk at the 'London Detectors Conference', where he must have presented the MSGC idea for the first time. Shortly after, I told him about my idea to operate MSGC at a few mbar pressure as a way of getting a fast, high gain electron multiplier, for single-electron counting. Applications foreseen: electron cluster counting for nanodosimetry and ultra-soft x-ray spectroscopy. He generously offered me some of his MSGC plates.
More recently, moving up by orders of magnitude in density, I came to study electroluminescence in MSGCs in liquid xenon – aiming at the development of single-phase noble liquid TPCs for Dark Matter. Bruno Guerard kindly found and provided me with some of the old good Anton MSGC plates… once more, it worked, but Anton was no longer with us to share the good news!"
2026 Prize award ceremony
The Anton Oed prize jury panel of 2026 was composed by Bruno Guérard (ILL, Grenoble, France), Paul Colas (CEA, Saclay, France), Leszek Ropelewski (CERN, Geneva, Switzerland) Andy White (University Texas Arlington, USA), Maxim Titov (CEA, Saclay, France) and Hugo Natal da Luz (CTU in Prague, Czech Republic).
Previous recipients of the prize were: