The 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to 13,508 physicists across four collaborative projects at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Dubbed the “Oscars of Science”, the award was announced on Saturday (April 5) as part of the 11th annual Breakthrough Prizes. Six prizes worth $3 million each were announced in Life Sciences, Mathematics and Fundamental Physics. The ceremony held in Santa Monica, California, featured Hollywood celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Jodie Foster and Zoe Saldana, and tech royalty like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. What are the Breakthrough Prizes? The awards were established in 2013 by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, former Google chief Sergey Brin, genomics company 23&Me founder Anne Wojcicki, and tech investor couple Yuri and Julia Milner. As part of its mission, the prize celebrates individual achievements and honours scientists as the heroes of society, aims to inspire the next generation of scientists, and pursues “science for the benefit of all as a global, apolitical organization.” BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE IN LIFE SCIENCES The award in this category was given to three groups of scientists: BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE IN FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICS The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to four collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. The LHC is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, causing protons to accelerate and collide, thus helping scientists study the properties of matter. The four collaborations studied the Higgs boson, considered as elementary as electrons, photons or neutrinos. The Higgs boson, also known as the ‘God Particle’, is known to impart mass to every other particle, and is believed to help explain how the Big Bang happened 13.7 million years ago. Thus, the collaborations studied the Higgs boson to understand how they impart mass to fundamental particles. They also discovered new types of particles to understand the strong nuclear force, and tested fundamental theories by discovering new processes to understand why matter exists in the universe. According to the award citation, the $3 million prize was awarded for their “detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties confirming the symmetry-breaking mechanism of mass generation, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles. and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances and most extreme conditions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”. The ATLAS and CMS collaborations will receive $1 million each, while ALICE and LHCb will receive $500,000 each. The award recognises the 13,508 co-authors of publications based on LHC Run-2 data released between 2015 and July 15, 2024. The prize funds will be awarded in their entirety to the CERN & Society Foundation for the collaborations, to award grants to doctoral students from member institutes researching at CERN. BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE IN MATHEMATICS The Mathematics Breakthrough Prize was awarded to Dennis Gaitsgory for “his central role in the proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture.” The Langlands program is described as a broad research program spanning several fields of mathematics, which grew out of a series of conjectures proposing precise connections between seemingly disparate mathematical concepts. The award recognises Gaitsgory’s dedication of over three decades to this research, having developed new mathematical tools in derived algebraic geometry to prove a major foundational conjecture within that field. OTHER AWARDS The Breakthrough Prize Foundation also announced six New Horizons Prizes, each worth $100,000, to honour eight early-career physicists and mathematicians. Additionally, the foundation awarded the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize to three women mathematicians who have completed their PhDs within the previous two years, each with a $50,000 cash award.
