2023 Beamline for School winners conducting their experiment at CERN (Image: CERN)
The 2025 awards of the High Energy and Particle Physics Division of the European Physical Society (EPS-HEPP) were announced this week and have this year recognised the success of Beamline for Schools (BL4S), an educational programme run by CERN in cooperation with the DESY laboratory in Germany, alongside the scientific contributions of two former members of the CERN personnel.
BL4S has received the EPS-HEPP Outreach Prize "for its exceptional and innovative approach to engaging high-school students worldwide in the field of particle physics. By providing students with the unique opportunity to propose and conduct experiments at leading research facilities such as CERN and DESY, it has significantly contributed to inspiring the next generation of scientists and fostering a global appreciation for fundamental research."
The annual BL4S competition was launched by CERN in 2014 on the occasion of the Laboratory's 60th anniversary and is funded by CERN & Society Foundation donors. More than 20 000 pupils from all over the world have taken part, and 25 teams have been selected as winners. The winning teams are given the unique opportunity to conduct their proposed experiments at an accelerator beamline, which provides beamsof subatomic particles that can be used to perform experiments in fields ranging from fundamental physics to materials science and medicine. Participation in the competition has risen consistently over the years, with a record 508 proposals from 72 countries received for the 2025 edition.
"This is a huge honour for the many individuals who have contributed to the success of the BL4S programme over the past 11 years," said project leader Jorge Andres Villa Velez (CERN). "In BL4S we create an environment for high-school students that resembles as much as possible the environment in which professionals do their research. This unlocks an enormous amount of curiosity, self-motivated learning and creativity among the students."
The EPS-HEPP prizes are awarded across several categories. The main EPS-HEPP Prize, which is granted every two years for an outstanding contribution to high-energy and particle physics, is shared by Martin Lüscher (CERN), Jürg Gasser and Heinrich Leutwyler (University of Bern) for groundbreaking contributions to the theoretical understanding of the strong interaction, which binds quarks inside atomic nuclei. Martin Lüscher is cited in particular for "his profound and transformative contributions to lattice quantum chromodynamics, which have elevated this framework into a precise and reliable tool for studying the non-perturbative regime of strong interactions."
The EPS-HEPP Young Experimental Physicist Prize recognises outstanding contributions by early-career researchers and has been awarded jointly to Thea Klæboe Årrestad (a member of the CMS collaboration and former CERN fellow) and Laura Zani (INFN Rome) for "their remarkable and complementary contributions to experimental particle physics," spanning advanced data analysis techniques to detector design and operations.
The awards will be presented during the EPS-HEP Conference, which will take place in Marseille from 7 to 11 July 2025.
