The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb collaborations during a ceremony held in Los Angeles on 5 April. From left to right: Andreas Hoecker (former ATLAS spokesperson), Patricia McBride (former CMS spokesperson), Marco van Leeuwen (ALICE spokesperson) and Vincenzo Vagnoni (LHCb spokesperson and Research Director of INFN Bologna).
On April the 5th, the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN were honoured with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. The prize is awarded to the four collaborations, which unite thousands of researchers from more than 70 countries, and concerns the papers authored based on LHC Run-2 data up to July 2024. It was received by the spokespersons who led the collaborations during that time.
The prize was awarded to the collaborations for their “detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties confirming the symmetry-breaking mechanism of mass generation, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles, the study of rare processes and matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances and most extreme conditions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”.
“I am extremely proud to see the extraordinary accomplishments of the LHC collaborations honoured with this prestigious Prize,” said Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General of CERN. “It is a beautiful recognition of the collective efforts, dedication, competence and hard work of thousands of people from all over the world who contribute daily to pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.”
Following consultation with the experiments’ management teams, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation will donate the $3 million Prize to the CERN & Society Foundation. The Prize money will be used to offer grants for doctoral students from the collaborations’ member institutes to spend research time at CERN, giving them experience in working at the forefront of science and new expertise to bring back to their home countries and regions.
ATLAS and CMS are general-purpose experiments, which pursue the full programme of exploration offered by the LHC’s high-energy and high-intensity proton and ion beams. They jointly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and continue to investigate its properties. ALICE studies quark-gluon plasma, a state of extremely hot and dense matter that existed in the first microseconds after the Big Bang, while LHCb explores minute differences between matter and antimatter, violation of fundamental symmetries and the complex spectra of composite particles (“hadrons”) made of heavy and light quarks, among other things.
By performing these extraordinarily precise and delicate tests, the LHC experiments have pushed the boundaries of knowledge of fundamental physics to unprecedented limits. They will continue to do so with the upcoming upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider, the High-Luminosity LHC, which aims to ramp up the performance of the LHC, starting in 2030, in order to increase the potential for discoveries.
The Bologna section of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Bologna (DIFA) are particularly proud of this award: by hosting members of all four collaborations, they have contributed substantially to the success of the experiments along the years, both in terms of detector construction and data analysis.