Members of the Stony Brook University Department of Physics and Astronomy have been awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their work at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This award is seen as a celebration of achievements in scientific research, and founding sponsors include Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, who refer to it as the “Oscars of Science.”
The Stony Brook team composed of professors and researchers, including Profs. Arnold, Dao, Engelmann, Hobbs, Jia, McCarthy, Piacquadio, Rijssenbeek, Schamberger, and Tsybyshev, along with Dr. Bee, contributed significantly to the ATLAS experiment at CERN. This group made notable contributions to the study of the Higgs boson particle properties, particularly in its decay to pairs of bottom quarks, charm quarks, and muons. They lead U.S. contributions to ATLAS operations, software, and computing.
Executive Vice President and Provost Carl W. Lejuez praised the team's contribution, stating, “Stony Brook’s HEP-ATLAS team has contributed significantly to our understanding of physics, from what could be in dark matter to the Higgs boson particle, and I sincerely congratulate them on the work that has earned them this tremendous recognition.”
The Breakthrough Prize acknowledges the work of researchers from more than 70 countries involved in various experimental collaborations including ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb, emphasizing their findings on the Higgs boson properties, new strongly interacting particles, rare processes, and matter-antimatter asymmetry. Chang Kee Jung, chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, expressed pride in the group's role: “The Stony Brook HEP-ATLAS group has been making significant contributions to the ATLAS experiment since the inception of the collaboration and the experiment.”
The $3 million prize will be donated to the CERN & Society Foundation, facilitating doctoral student research grants at CERN to foster experience and expertise.
Additionally, Stony Brook University Professor John Pardon was honored with the 2025 New Horizon in Mathematics Breakthrough Prize for early-career researchers, recognizing his contributions in geometry and topology, with a focus on symplectic geometry and pseudo-holomorphic curves.