Earlier this month, four collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, at CERN were honored with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
UC Riverside is a founding member of one of these collaborations, the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, experiment. One of the largest international scientific collaborations in history, the CMS experiment is conducting a thorough characterization of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle in the standard model of particle physics. CMS collaborators have developed novel techniques for analyzing the data from LHC collisions with extraordinary precision.
The CMS experiment will receive a $1 million share of the $3 million prize, with the rest distributed among the ALICE, ATLAS, and LHCb collaborations. Together, the collaborations unite thousands of researchers from more than 70 countries 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 prize money will fund grants for doctoral students from the collaboration’s member institutions, including UCR, enabling them to conduct research at CERN. This opportunity will give them hands-on experience at the cutting edge of science and allow them to bring valuable knowledge and skills back to their home countries and regions.
“It is wonderful to receive such a highly visible award for our work in fundamental physics,” said Bill Gary, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCR, who has been an active participant in the CMS experiment since its beginning. “This award is in part an acknowledgement of our contributions to the detector construction, calibration, commissioning, operation, and project leadership, and to our UCR-led studies in searches for Higgs bosons, new particles and phenomena, and precision measurements of subnuclear processes.”
Gary, a member of CMS since 1992, has led many CMS searches for supersymmetric particles and hypothetical dark matter candidates and is a former chair of the CMS Publications Board.
Presented in the fields of life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics, the Breakthrough Prizes recognize the world’s top scientists working in the fundamental sciences. The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was founded in 2012 by Yuri Milner and is open to all physicists – theoretical, mathematical, experimental – working on the deepest mysteries of the universe. Names of the CMS prizewinners this year.