“I am extremely proud to see the extraordinary accomplishments of the LHC collaborations honoured with this prestigious Prize. It is a beautiful recognition of the collective efforts, dedication, competence and hard work of thousands of people from all over the world who contribute daily to pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.”

Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General 2016-2025

New researchers break through

In 2025, the LHC experiment collaborations: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb were awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation for their  “detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties confirming the symmetry-breaking mechanism of mass generation, 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 most extreme conditions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”.

The experiments’ management teams chose to donate the $3 million Prize to the CERN & Society Foundation 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.