For their role in exploring the building blocks of the universe at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, Northeastern researchers have earned a share of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
Scientists from Northeastern University are among the thousands of collaborators awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their research into the fundamental nature of matter at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
Officials from the Breakthrough Prizes, known as “the Oscars of Science,” said the winning collaborations at CERN are being recognized for testing the modern theory of particle physics, including precisely measuring the properties of the Higgs boson.
Particle physics is the study of the smallest things in the universe, including quarks, leptons and bosons.
The Breakthrough Prize recognizes the complexity of the work involved in studying the particles at the massive Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, says Northeastern physics professor Louise Skinnari.
“It is a fundamentally collaborative effort. The type of science we do is really trying to understand how nature and the universe work on the smallest scales at the subatomic scale,” says Skinnari.
She was named in the award along with Northeastern physics professors Toyoko Orimoto, Johan Bonilla Castro, Emanuela Barberis and Darien Wood. Also recognized were emeritus faculty George Alverson and numerous current and former post-doctoral researchers and Ph.D students from Northeastern.
The world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider is located about 100 meters underground and measures 17 miles in circumference.
It accelerates particles to nearly the speed of light to study them and the forces by which they interact in the hopes of unlocking the secrets of dark matter and dark energy that make up 95% of the universe.
Northeastern physicists at CERN are conducting research on a number of projects, including ways to upgrade the collider’s detectors and create filters to identify the most interesting of the millions of collisions that occur each second, says Skinnari, an expert on top quarks, which are fundamental particles that cannot be subdivided into different particles.
The Northeastern researchers are working with CMS, one of four experimental collaborations involving more than 13,000 scientists from 70 countries that together won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
“The CMS detector kind of acts like a giant digital camera to see what comes out of these collisions. So it’s very fundamental science in that aspect,” Skinnari says. “We’re also using top quarks as a way to search for new physics beyond our currently established framework, what we call the standard model.”
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the acronym for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is currently the only place scientists can study the Higgs boson. The U.S. Department of Energy says it is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field that gives the universe its mass.
The Breakthrough Prize “is about the explosion of research that has happened since” the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, says Bonilla Castro.
“The experiments have gotten larger and more complex, and as a consequence, they also have larger collaborations involved with the experiment,” Skinnari says.
“That’s true both in particle physics and cosmology, which looks at the biggest structures in the universe instead of the tiniest,” she says.
The $3 million in prize money is being split between the four collaborations, which in addition to CMS include ATLAS, ALICE and LHCb, and will be used to offer grants for doctoral students.
In total, 10 “Oscars of Science” Breakthrough Prizes were honored at a ceremony in Los Angeles. Founding sponsors of the Breakthrough Prizes include Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki.