McGill.CA / Science / Department of Physics

Four LHC collaborations receive the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

ATLAS McGill Logo Apr 2025: ATLAS (of which McGill is a member institution), CMS, ALICE and LHCb are the recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. for the corpus of scientific contributions based on LHC Run-2 data from 2015 and up to July 2024.

This year, McGill celebrates its 20th anniversary as a member of the ATLAS international collaboration. The McGill team first distinguished itself through contributions to the initial trigger system that collected data leading to the historic Higgs boson discovery in 2012. Over the past decade, McGill played a central role in the development and construction of an innovative particle detector technology in Canada, specifically engineered to meet the unprecedented data-taking challenges of CERN's future High-Luminosity LHC project. Most recently, the team has been further contributing to this project through the development of a state-of-the-art electronic readout system for the ATLAS detector, incorporating machine learning approaches to energy reconstruction that promise significant improvements in detector performance and physics capabilities.  These contributions to the ATLAS experiment have secured McGill's access to ATLAS' unique dataset, enabling McGill’s researchers to publish impactful scientific measurements that continue to expand our understanding of fundamental physics.  In these past two decades, the McGill team has trained a total of 60 undergraduate students, 39 graduate students and 15 postdocs.

Congratulations to the four collaborations and their 13,508 co-authors, and particularly to McGill members of ATLAS (faculty members Brigitte Vachon, Francois Corriveau, and Andreas Warburton, and their group members)