Major Award for CERN Experiments

The Breakthrough Prize is endowed with US$3 million, the most lucrative physics award in the world. The four collaborations ALICE, ATLAS, CSM and LHCb were honored for their detailed measurements of the Higgs boson, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles, the study of rare processes and matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances and under the most extreme conditions. According to a statement from CERN, the prize money will be used to fund grants for doctoral students from the institutions involved in the experiments.

The Higgs particle, which was described in the Standard Model of particle physics in the 1960s, was first detected in CERN’s particle accelerator in 2012. “This prize celebrates the vision, talent and dedication of thousands of people involved in the LHC experiments,” says UZH physics professor Florencia Canelli. “Thanks to their efforts – and the vital support of public funding agencies – we are redefining our understanding of the Universe at its most fundamental level.”

Canelli served as the physics coordinator for the CMS project from 2021 to 2023, overseeing the publication of more than a hundred scientific articles per year. “I’m incredibly proud of our collective achievements, the essential contributions of our UZH teams and to see the LHC collaborations honored with this prestigious award,” says Canelli.

Researchers at UZH have been deeply involved in the detector development, operations and data analysis of the CMS and LHCb experiments since their inception. The teams led by Florencia Canelli, Ben Kilminster and Lea Caminada have made major contributions to the CMS pixel detector, which is vital for the identification of long-lived particles of Higgs bosons.

Meanwhile, the group formerly led by Ueli Straumann and now led by Nicola Serra has advanced the LHCb tracking stations and explored phenomena related to the three generations of elementary particles in the Standard Model.

Canelli herself will play a major role in shaping the future development of research at CERN. Last December, she was elected vice-president of the CERN Council, the organization’s highest authority. In the coming years, the CERN Council will decide on CERN’s next flagship facility to succeed the LHC accelerator, which is expected to cease operations around 2040. The Council will review the outcomes of the Future Circular Collider feasibility study and the recommendations of the ongoing update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, expected by early next year.