The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has been awarded to the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb collaborations during a ceremony held on April 5 in Los Angeles, attended by Marco Van Leeuwen, spokesperson for ALICE, Andreas Hoecker, former spokesperson for ATLAS, Patricia McBride, former spokesperson for CMS, and Vincenzo Vagnoni, spokesperson for LHCb.
The prize was specifically awarded to the members of the four collaborations who published, between 2015 and July 2024, results based on data collected during Run 2 of the LHC. The foundation’s website lists by name the thousands of laureates (ATLAS: 5,345 researchers; CMS: 4,550; ALICE: 1,869; LHCb: 1,744). The award recognizes: “detailed measurements of the 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.”
The $3 million prize is shared among ATLAS ($1 million), CMS ($1 million), ALICE ($500,000), and LHCb ($500,000). In agreement with the four collaborations, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation will donate the full $3 million award to the CERN & Society Foundation, which will use it to support PhD students from member institutes in carrying out research stays at CERN.
The Breakthrough Prize Foundation honors major scientific advances. It was established in 2012 by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan of Facebook, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, and Yuri Milner and Anne Wojcicki, co-founders of 23andMe. Each year, it awards three $3 million prizes in the fields of fundamental physics, life sciences, and mathematics.