Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for four collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider

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. Also staff of our Institute for Gravitational and Subatomic Physics is involved in the ALICE collaboration: Alessandro Grelli, Marta Verweij, Thomas Peitzmann and Raimond Snellings to name just a few.

During a ceremony held in Los Angeles on 5 April, the prize was received by the spokespersons who led the collaborations during that time, among whom Nikhef (National Institute for Subatomic Physics) researcher Marco van Leeuwen as spokesperson of the ALICE collaboration.

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'.