Penn ATLAS shares 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Researchers from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN, which includes physicists in the Penn ATLAS group, received the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their work studying high-energy collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). ATLAS shares the $3 million award with three other experiments at CERN—CMS, ALICE, and LHCb—recognizing the efforts of some 13,500 scientists worldwide.

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More than two dozen members make up the Penn ATLAS team, which includes Joseph Kroll, Robert I. Williams Endowed Term Professor of Physics and Astronomy; Evelyn Thomson, professor of physics and astronomy; Elliot Lipeles, professor of physics and astronomy; Dylan Rankin, assistant professor of physics and astronomy; and Brig Williams, emeritus professor of physics and astronomy, as well as numerous Ph.D. students, postdocs, and technical staff in the School of Arts & Sciences.

“To do this great science you need a really big team,” Lipeles says. “The LHC is the most complicated piece of equipment ever built. I don’t think anything even comes close. Which means in the end, all the different bits and pieces have different groups responsible for them.”

The Breakthrough Prize, one of science’s highest honors, is annually awarded in the categories of Life Sciences, Mathematics, and Fundamental Physics. Presented as an Academy Award–style honor for scientists, the prize—and the event around it—frequently attracts big names from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. But for all the glitz and glamor, the award itself honors intensive, painstaking work.

At Penn, that has meant a variety of efforts. The team played a leading role in the discovery of the Higgs boson particle 12 years ago and continues to make precision measurements of the particle’s properties. One of the most intriguing ongoing searches entails looking for signs that the Higgs boson can decay invisibly to dark matter. “Searches are also underway for signs of new particles that are partners to the Higgs boson,” Thomson says.

In addition, the research team is confirming and investigating facets of the Standard Model, an extraordinarily successful model in particle physics that can be used to describe elementary particles and their interactions in a range of environments, from proton collisions in labs to the early universe.

Yet scientists understand that the model is incomplete. To that end, Lipeles, Kroll, and Thomson are all working on aspects of something called supersymmetry, which tries to fill in some of the Standard Model’s holes. “Supersymmetry could offer explanations for the nature of dark matter, why the Higgs boson has the mass it does, even whether we’re in a stable or unstable universe,” Kroll says.

Then there’s the extensive data coming out of this project. Rankin, for example, uses machine learning to analyze whether the Standard Model’s predictions match the outcomes. “We have the Standard Model, which we use to predict what should happen when we collide protons. We can look at the data and say, is this what actually happens?” Rankin explains. “The signals we are looking for are hidden in this enormous volume of data, and machine learning is allowing us to look in places and in ways that we simply wouldn’t have been able to look otherwise.”

Read more at Omnia.