The spokespersons of the four LHC experiments at the award ceremony
DESY scientists are among the recipients of the prestigious Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The Breakthrough Prizes, sometimes referred to as “Oscars of Science”, are awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation to a range of different scientific disciplines. This year’s Prize for Fundamental Physics, worth three million US dollars, recognises the 13 000+ scientists from around the world working on the four experiments ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva – and thus some 250 scientists in the ATLAS and CMS groups at DESY.
It explicitly lists the papers authored based on LHC Run-2 data up to July 2024 and their scientific achievements, notably “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.”
“My heartfelt congratulations to all recipients,” says Beate Heinemann, Chair of the DESY Board of Directors and herself a particle physicist involved in the work that led to this prize. “I am delighted that the prizemoney will be spent to support a new generation of physicists and look forward to more breakthrough insights from the next run of the LHC that is starting these very days.”
“I am very pleased to see the hard work that was done by so many people over the last years recognised,” says Ties Behnke, acting Director in charge of Particle Physics at DESY. “The discovery of the Higgs boson, a cornerstone in our understanding of the universe, was a triumph of decades-long dedication, innovation, and global teamwork. DESY played and continues to play a pivotal role in the global endeavour.”
Watch the awards ceremony with celebrity hosts and guests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on5LxZjRkA8&t=504s
Read more about the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics here: https://breakthroughprize.org/Prize/1
