The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has been awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for its pioneering studies of the high-energy collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Lancaster University has five academics plus postdoctoral and PhD students involved in the ATLAS collaboration : Guennadi Borissov, James Ferrando, Harald Fox, Vato Kartvelishvili and Head of Physics Roger Jones, who has leadership roles in the worldwide system supporting all the experiments included in the award.
The prize, shared with the ALICE, CMS and LHCb Collaborations, recognises the extraordinary contributions of 13,508 international researchers who have pushed the boundaries of particle physics to unprecedented heights.
The Breakthrough prize was awarded for "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."
ATLAS Spokesperson Stephane Willocq said: "The Breakthrough Prize is a testament to the dedication and ingenuity of the ATLAS Collaboration and our colleagues across the LHC experiments. In particular, Run 2 was a transformative period for particle physics. The results we achieved with its dataset have deepened our understanding of the Higgs boson, the Standard Model and the fundamental symmetries of Nature."
In 2012, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations announced the discovery of a brand-new particle at CERN: the Higgs boson, a newly discovered particle that helps explain how everything in the Universe has 'mass'. This groundbreaking achievement earned ATLAS, CMS, and LHC scientists the 2013 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
The Collaboration has since made tremendous strides, observing and measuring all the primary production and decay mechanisms of the Higgs boson, enabling ATLAS to derive the predicted non-universal, mass-dependent interaction strengths with other particles. These results emerged as early as 2018, with ATLAS detecting the Higgs boson decaying into b-quarks - a process accounting for more than half of all Higgs decays - and observing its rare associated production with top-quark pairs.
More recently, ATLAS measured the Higgs-boson mass with 0.09% precision.
Professor Jones said: "We had work on determining the nature of the Higgs since it was discovered, and looking for Higgs Bosons produced in pairs. We also have extremely precise measurements of the asymmetry in nature between matter and antimatter - and using the same tools, an exquisitely precise particle lifetime measurement which was mentioned by the Director General of CERN. The same techniques also allowed searches for new particles that would not decay instantly but travel away from the initial point of their creation. We have also been probing the so-called Standard Model of particle physics using the decays of the heaviest of the quarks, the top quark, and also unveiling the structure of the colliding protons."
Lancaster University is one of four principal analysis and simulation sites in the UK and so has played a key part in the overall computing required to process the vast datasets.
Lancaster researchers have also been actively involved in working with the detectors that measure the particle paths ("tracking") and the systems that select the interesting events from the vast data rate in real time ("triggering").
Through the CERN & Society Foundation, the Breakthrough prize will fund PhD scholarships to support the next generation of ATLAS scientists as they build on this legacy of discovery.
