Scientists from Université Paris Cité, including two EIDD faculty members, Marco Bomben and Philippe Schwemling, are among the thousands of researchers worldwide honored with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. This prestigious award was granted to the ATLAS collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), alongside its sister experiments ALICE, CMS, and LHCb.
ATLAS is one of the largest and most complex scientific instruments ever built. This versatile detector, over 40 meters long and about 25 meters high, was designed to probe the fundamental components of matter and the forces that govern the Universe. With its cutting-edge systems, it tracks particles produced in high-energy collisions, enabling major discoveries such as the Higgs boson and opening new pathways in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model.
The Breakthrough Prize especially highlights ATLAS’s essential contributions to particle physics: precise measurements of Higgs boson properties, the study of rare processes, investigations into matter-antimatter asymmetry, and explorations of nature under extreme conditions. This international recognition also celebrates the excellence of research conducted at Université Paris Cité.
Université Paris Cité has played a key role in the ATLAS collaboration since its inception, contributing significantly in the following areas:
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The construction and operation of the liquid-argon electromagnetic calorimeter, essential for measuring the energy of electrons and photons.
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Performance studies of the ATLAS inner tracking detector, crucial for reconstructing and measuring the trajectories of charged particles and interaction vertices.
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Numerous physics results: the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson and subsequent measurements of its properties (mass, spin, couplings); Standard Model measurements (including the top quark mass and differential cross-section measurements for jets and other processes); and searches for new phenomena beyond the Standard Model, some of which may offer clues to the mystery of dark matter.
While the ATLAS collaboration celebrates the recognition of the Breakthrough Prize, it remains focused on the future. The third run of the LHC is currently underway, and preparations for the high-luminosity upgrade (HL-LHC) are advancing rapidly. UPCité’s ATLAS teams are playing a key role in this new phase, particularly in the development of the ITk and HGTD detectors for the HL-LHC, which will increase the collision rate tenfold starting in 2030.
Learn more :https://physique.u-paris.fr/actualites/prix-breakthrough