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CERN discovers new particles: revolutionary breakthroughs in physics!
The TU Dortmund is participating in groundbreaking LHC experiments on particle physics and receives the Breakthrough Prize 2025.
CERN discovers new particles: revolutionary breakthroughs in physics!
On April 5, 2025, the prestigious “Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics” was awarded at CERN in Los Angeles. This award recognizes outstanding contributions to the four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb. The achievements of our international research community, consisting of over 10,000 scientists from more than 70 countries, are not only impressive, but also central to our understanding of the universe. According to the TU Dortmund Significant discoveries have been made in the field of particle physics to date.
Using the high-energy accelerator in the 27-kilometer underground tunnel, proton packets are accelerated to almost the speed of light. Collisions produce countless elementary particles, whose energies and decay processes are precisely measured using huge detectors. The ATLAS detector in particular has discovered the Higgs boson in the past and also examined its properties in detail. With the latest findings from the data up to July 2024 referenced in the award, the groups have made significant advances in particle physics, such as CERN reported.
The importance of experiments
The achievements of the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb collaborations deserve particular mention. They not only confirmed the properties of the Higgs boson in detailed measurements, but also discovered new strongly interacting particles and explored matter-antimatter asymmetry. CERN Director General Fabiola Gianotti expressed pride at the recognition of the achievements of the LHC collaborations, highlighting international collaboration in science. The $3 million prize money will be donated to the CERN & Society Foundation to fund scholarships for graduate students wishing to conduct research at CERN.
The Higgs boson, whose discovery will be celebrated by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations for their tenth anniversary on July 4, 2012, plays a crucial role in modern particle physics. It gives elementary particles their mass and is a central element of the Standard Model. Its properties were confirmed by data on decay processes in photons. However, there is still a need for research to understand the full effects of the Higgs field. How CERN notes, the final data set was just a fraction of a much larger amount of information the collider can provide.
Looking into the future
Starting in 2030, CERN plans a major upgrade to the LHC, known as the high-luminosity LHC. This upgrade will significantly increase discovery potential and enable further exploration of the remaining mysteries of particle physics. Researchers are grappling with questions about whether the Higgs field also gives mass to lighter fermions and whether it interacts with dark matter. The collaboration between many institutions and the ambitions for future projects such as the Future Circular Collider demonstrate the commitment of the global scientific community to answer fundamental questions in physics.
The developments at the LHC are not only important for basic science; they have also historically spawned far-reaching technological advances, such as the World Wide Web and PET scanners. Research at CERN is therefore not only a search for the fundamental building blocks of matter, but also an investment in our future knowledge and technologies.