VCI 2025

The Detector Community's Vienna Meeting

The Vienna Conference on Instrumentation is one of the standing meetings of the detector-physics community, organised by the Institute of High Energy Physics (HEPHY) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences together with TU Wien, and held every three years. The 17th edition took place at TU Wien's Faculty of Electrical Engineering from 17 to 21 February 2025 and ran its programme on HEPCon.

Instrumentation programmes have a shape of their own. VCI 2025 had 217 talks from 220 speakers in 51 sessions — and 1,097 authors behind them, because a detector paper is a collaboration paper. Every author is a person in the app, with their own page and their other contributions, rather than a truncated "et al." on a session card.

Plenaries by Topic, Parallels by Technology

The mornings were plenary and organised by theme: future facilities, experiment upgrades, electronics, timing, neutrino and dark-matter detectors, quantum sensing, selected R&D, and a closing plenary on machine learning with the conference awards. The parallel sessions — up to three at a time — were organised by detector technology, semiconductor detectors among them, which is how the community itself thinks: attendees followed a technology across the week rather than a physics topic. The personal schedule and the overlap flags did the bookkeeping across the three streams.

Materials and Search

211 talk materials came through from the Indico timetable and were readable in the app, on the phone, during and after the sessions. The full programme was searchable offline — by detector type, by speaker, by institute — which at a conference of 217 talks is the difference between finding the talk on a particular sensor and remembering to ask someone at coffee.

Synced from Indico

The programme lived in Indico and stayed there; HEPCon read the timetable, speakers, rooms and materials and re-read them as the schedule moved during the week, so the organizers never maintained a second copy. On the attendee side the programme was cached on first open and kept working between the faculty's lecture rooms without depending on the network.

One App Across the Instrumentation Calendar

The people at VCI are the people at TWEPP and at the detector conferences of the years between. Because those meetings live in the same HEPCon app, a returning attendee opens an installed app, and a speaker's page shows their instrumentation talks across conferences rather than across nothing.