This year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to experimentalists at the Large Hadron Collider, where Brown physicists have played key roles in revealing the deepest mysteries of the universe.

Students pose in front of a mockup of the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Professor Meenakshi Narain (upper right), was a prominent member of the CMS team before her death in 2023.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The Breakthrough Prize Foundation has awarded its 2025 prize in fundamental physics to the major research collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. The awardees include the team behind the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, to which Brown University researchers have made key contributions for decades.

“This prize highlights the scientific achievements of the thousands of researchers who contributed to the experiments at the LHC,” said Ulrich Heintz, a professor of physics at Brown who has worked with the CMS experiment for more than a decade. “The LHC is the largest scientific instrument ever built, and it shows what we can achieve if we work together across national and other boundaries to pursue a common goal.”

The Breakthrough Prize was created to celebrate the wonders of the scientific age, according to its founding sponsors Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. Six prizes of $3 million each are awarded each year in life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics. The CMS experiment shared the fundamental physics prize with the other large experiments at the Large Hadron Collider: ATLAS, ALICE and LHCb.

As the world’s largest particle accelerator, the LHC uses superconducting magnets to whip particles around a 17-mile circle at near the speed of light. Collisions between those particles reveal details about the fundamental properties of matter, energy and the universe itself. Data from the collisions are collected by enormous and exquisitely sensitive detectors, including the CMS detector. Brown faculty and students have been active at the LHC since before it opened in 2008, developing components for CMS and helping to guide the experiment.

Among the accomplishments noted in the prize announcement was the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is the physical manifestation of the phenomenon that gives some elementary particles their mass and was considered the final missing piece of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Current and former Brown faculty and students — including professors David Cutts, Heintz, Greg Landsberg, and the late Meenakshi Narain — played key roles in the work that led to the Higgs discovery

Narain would later chair the collaboration board of U.S. institutions at the CMS, the largest of the experiment’s international teams. In that capacity, Narain helped to guide CMS in looking for physics beyond the standard model, including searches for dark matter and particles associated with supersymmetry and string theories.

Brown faculty continue to work on the next phase of the CMS experiment. Heintz’s lab is currently building sensor components that will be included in the next iteration of the CMS detector. More recent additions to the Brown faculty — assistant professors Gaetano Barone, Loukas Gouskos, Matt LeBlanc and Jennifer Roloff — continue to research the Higgs mechanism, quarks (the fundamental building blocks of protons and neutrons), as well as new machine learning and AI approaches to sorting the astronomical amount of data produced by billions of particle collisions per second.

“Together we are preparing for a new high-intensity phase of the LHC in the coming decade,” Heintz said.

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