The 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics awarded to ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb collaborations

The 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has been awarded to the co-authors of scientific publications from the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb experiments at CERN‘s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The prestigious award was given by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation “for the detailed measurements of the properties of the Higgs boson confirming the mechanism for the breaking of electroweak symmetry, the discovery of new particles interacting through the strong force, the study of rare processes and of matter-antimatter asymmetry, and for exploring the nature of matter at the smallest scales and at the highest energies at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.” The prize recognizes achievements made during Run 2 of the LHC and was presented to the coordinators of the four major experiment collaborations during a ceremony held in Los Angeles on Saturday, April 5, 2025.

The scientific collaborations of the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb experiments include thousands of researchers from over 70 countries worldwide, including Italy, which is among the founders of CERN and a leading contributor to its scientific success, with contributions coordinated by the INFN National Institute for Nuclear Physics.

“I am very proud to see the excellent work of the scientific collaborations engaged at the LHC accelerator honored with this prize,” commented Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General of CERN. “Thousands of people at CERN contribute daily to expanding the boundaries of human knowledge, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics underlines the importance of CERN as a model of peaceful collaboration in the development of science and technology.”

“Congratulations to the collaborations of ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb: this prestigious international award is a recognition of their tireless and passionate work at the frontiers of science and technology and of the enormous scientific value of their results,” comments Antonio Zoccoli, President of INFN. “As INFN, we are proud to have contributed substantially to these wonderful collective endeavors, and we will continue to contribute and support, to the best of our ability, the upcoming projects at the LHC and future accelerators, to design together the future of CERN and particle physics,” Zoccoli concludes.

After consulting with the experiment management groups, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation will donate the $3 million prize to the CERN & Society Foundation. The prize will be used to offer scholarships to doctoral students from member institutions of the collaborations to spend a research period at CERN, giving them the opportunity to gain work experience at the forefront of cutting-edge science and acquire new skills to bring back to their countries and regions of origin.

ATLAS and CMS are general-purpose experiments that explore the full scientific program offered by studying the products of collisions of high-energy, high-intensity beams of protons and ions at the LHC. ATLAS and CMS are the two experiments that jointly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, the properties of which they continue to investigate today.
ALICE studies in particular the quark-gluon plasma, an extremely hot and dense state of matter that existed in the first microseconds after the Big Bang, while LHCb explores the minute differences between matter and antimatter, the violation of fundamental symmetries, and the complex spectra of particles (hadrons) composed of heavy and light quarks.

In Padua, the CMS, ALICE and LHCb experiments have involved almost a hundred participants through the years, including researchers from INFN and the Department of Physics and Astronomy, affiliated with INFN.
“I am delighted that the community of large experiments at the LHC has received this award, which proves that large international collaborations can achieve exceptional results,” comments Roberto Carlin, Director of the Padua Division and former CMS spokesperson. “I am proud because researchers from Padua have had and continue to have a very important role in the development, operation and data analysis of these gigantic experiments, and will continue to do so in the coming years, continuing to innovate the detectors and the analysis of new data.”