University of Michigan scientists are among the thousands of researchers worldwide honored with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Breakthrough Prizes, sometimes referred to as the Oscars of the sciences, recognize “the disciplines that ask the biggest questions and find the deepest explanations,” according to the award’s website. The prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki.

This year, several experiments running at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, have been honored with the prize’s fundamental physics award.

Research at the LHC is performed by thousands of scientists from hundreds of institutions around the world.

“It’s really exciting to have this recognition of an international scientific collaboration,” said Jianming Qian, professor of physics and member of the LHC’s ATLAS experiment. “Big science needs international collaboration and this is just an example of how productive we can be.”

ATLAS, which stands for A Toroidal LHC Apparatus, is the largest general-purpose experiment at the LHC. It was recognized alongside three other LHC experiments: the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, abbreviated CMS; ALICE, or A Large Ion Collider Experiment; and the LHCb experiment, which stands for LHC beauty.

U-M currently has more than 30 researchers working on the ATLAS and LHCb experiments. Scores of past students and research fellows have also contributed to the work recognized by the Breakthrough Prize.

“This research is built on innovation and scholarship,” said Bing Zhou, professor of physics and the U.S. Department of Energy principal investigator for the ATLAS project. “This is something that we should be really proud of.”

The boson that keeps on giving

The LHC made news and history when it enabled the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, which helps account for why some of the universe’s fundamental particles have mass.

“People called it a ‘ghost particle’ because it was so hard to find,” Zhou said. “It took a long, long time to discover it, but now that we have found it, it’s become an important tool to search for physics we couldn’t access before. It’s become a bridge to new research.”

The new Breakthrough Prize recognizes the work the LHC has done since then in characterizing the Higgs boson and exploring other fundamental mysteries of particle physics, like why the universe has more matter than antimatter.

“The Breakthrough Prize is a testament to the dedication and ingenuity of the ATLAS Collaboration and our colleagues across the LHC experiments,” said ATLAS spokesperson Stephane Willocq. “This prize recognizes the collective vision and monumental effort of thousands of ATLAS collaborators worldwide.”

The U-M cohort of researchers have played a pivotal role in this work.

“The group is deeply involved in several research areas recognized by the Breakthrough Prize, including the detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties, the study of rare processes and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances,” Qian said.

The experiment has long had a strong U-M contingent, founded by the late and renowned physicist Homer Neal, the namesake of U-M’s Homer A. Neal Laboratory. Neal established the U-M ATLAS group with the late Rudolf Thun and Jay Chapman, now an emeritus professor, in the 1990s.

Today, that group is led by Zhou, Qian, Junjie Zhu, Thomas Schwarz and Christian Herwig and consists of more than 30 members. The team spearheaded the construction, operation and upgrade of one of the largest particle detectors in the world, the ATLAS muon spectrometer.

“The muon spectrometer has played a crucial role in detecting muons, which are essential for Higgs boson studies, precision electroweak measurements and new physics searches,” said Zhu, professor of physics. “We are very proud of our work with the ATLAS muon spectrometer.”

The group also manages the ATLAS Great Lakes Tier 2 high-performance computing center, which is under the direction of physics researcher Shawn McKee.

The beauty of LHC

U-M’s contributions to the LHCb experiment began more recently, when Christine Aidala joined the collaboration in 2017.

The beauty that puts the b in LHCb is a reference to one of the six “flavors”—beauty, truth, charge, strange, up and down—that fundamental particles known as quarks come in. Quarks bind together to form more familiar particles, including protons and neutrons, but LHCb has also discovered more than 50 previously unknown bound states for quarks.

While Aidala and her team aren’t working on discovering those new particles, they are working toward a better understanding of how quarks bind together.

“We’ve been focused on the more established bound states. We have a lot more statistics for those, but there is still a lot to learn,” said Aidala, professor of physics.

Her team contributes to work done with what’s called the Upstream Tracker sub-detector that came online in 2022 and has a leadership role in LHCb’s open data project. The goal is to make the experiment’s data more valuable to researchers, educators and students around the world.

“In the case of CERN, taxpayers from different countries have paid for this data,” Aidala said. “We have petabytes of data and we’re trying to make it more usable, more accessible.”

That includes making the data available to researchers who don’t work at the LHC. But it can also be packaged for educational modules to give undergraduates and even high schoolers a chance to work with real data, Aidala said.

For the professional particle physicist, the work done at LHCb can also help explain the imbalance between the universe’s matter and antimatter, which was cited in the Breakthrough Prize announcement.

“The award of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize is a great honor for the LHCb collaboration,” said LHCb spokesperson Vincenzo Vagnoni. “It underlines the importance of the many measurements made by the LHCb experiment in flavor physics and spectroscopy through the exploration of subtle differences between matter and antimatter and the discovery of several new heavy quark hadrons.”

The Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics comes with an award of $3 million U.S. dollars, which will be donated to the CERN and Society Foundation. The prize money will help support grad students from CERN’s member institutions.

Breakthrough Prizes were also awarded for life sciences and mathematics.

“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.”