Physicists from The University of Manchester are among global researchers part of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collaborations, who have been honoured with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
The Breakthrough Prize - popularly known as the "Oscars of Science" - honours scientists driving remarkable discoveries.
CERN's four major LHC experiment collaborations - ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb - have been recognised for testing the modern theory of particle physics - the Standard Model - and other theories describing physics that might lie beyond it to high precision.
In particular, the team have been awarded for discoveries made during the LHC Run-2 data up to July 2024, including detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties, the discovery of new particles, matter-antimatter asymmetry and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances and most extreme conditions.
The University of Manchester researchers are involved in two of the four projects, ATLAS and LHCb. ATLAS is designed to record the high-energy particle collisions of the LHC to investigate the fundamental building blocks of matter and the forces governing our universe in order to better understand building blocks of life, while LHCb focuses on investigating the slight differences between matter and antimatter.
Professor Chris Parkes, Head of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Manchester and former leader of the LHCb experiment explained that for his experiment "the department constructed a silicon pixel based 'camera' for the new version of the experiment that takes images 40 million times per second. Members played significant roles in the discovery of new matter antimatter differences and the discovery of new particles".
The four LHC experiment collaborations involve thousands of researchers from over 70 countries. The $3M award was collected at a ceremony in LA by Parkes' successor as leader of the experiment along with the leaders of the other three experiments.
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.
Going forward, the LHC experiments will continue to push the boundaries of knowledge of fundamental physics to unprecedented limits. The upcoming upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider, the High-Luminosity LHC, which many of The University of Manchester's physicists and engineers are involved in, aims to ramp up the performance of the LHC, starting in 2030, in order to increase the potential for discoveries.
