Last weekend, 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. Nikhef is closely involved in the ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb collaborations at CERN.
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 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”.
“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.”
Following consultation with the experiments’ management teams, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation will donate the $3 million Prize to the CERN & Society Foundation. The Prize money will be used to offer grants for doctoral students from the collaborations’ member institutes to spend research time at CERN, giving them experience in working at the forefront of science and new expertise to bring back to their home countries and regions.
“The ALICE collaboration is honoured to receive the Breakthrough Prize for the investigation of the properties of the hottest and densest matter available in a laboratory, quark-gluon plasma”, says ALICE spokesperson and Nikhef researcher Marco van Leeuwen. “The new grants funded through this prize will contribute to training the next generation of ALICE scientists.”
About the Breakthrough Prizes:
The Breakthrough Prizes founded in 2012 by Yuri Milner, honor important, primarily recent, achievements in the categories of Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences and Mathematics.
Source: CERN