2025 Frontiers of Science Award in Physics

Davide Cassani, researcher at INFN Padova, has been awarded the 2025 Frontiers of Science Award in Physics for his article “Microscopic origin of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of supersymmetric AdS5 black holes”, co-authored with Alejandro Cabo-Bizet, Dario Martelli, and Sameer Murthy. The award is shared with two other papers on the same topic.

The Frontiers of Science Award was established in 2023 under the auspices of the International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS) and is sponsored by the City of Beijing and the Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (BIMSA). It is given to scientific papers published in the last decade that have made significant breakthrough in their field. Each year, researchers from all over the world are invited to nominate candidates, and a panel of experts selects a shortlist for each research area. A Global Committee, selected by the ICBS, appoints the winners from the shortlisted candidates. 

Cassani’s work has been awarded in the area of String Theory and Quantum Gravity. The paper deals with a central problem in theoretical physics: understanding the origin of black hole entropy. Fifty years ago, Bekenstein and Hawking argued that the event horizon of a black hole stores a huge amount of information, which cannot be explained by classical physics, resulting in a very large entropy. Explaining what quantum microscopic degrees of freedom can account for this entropy has been a long-standing endeavour. The paper addresses this problem in the context of string theory taking advantage of the holographic principle, which allows us to study quantum gravity in a given spacetime by using a seemingly unrelated theory which has no gravity and lives at the boundary of that spacetime. The paper made important contributions towards understanding how the computation of black hole entropy can be carried out in great detail by using this auxiliary theory, at least in simplified setups.

The award ceremony took place in July 2025 during the International Congress of Basic Science in Beijing, a major international event gathering leading researchers from mathematics, physics and computer science.