On April 5th, 2025 (local time), the Breakthrough Prize Foundation announced the list of winners of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Los Angeles, USA. Including the ATLAS members in Nanjing University, 13508 researchers from more than 70 countries are honoured with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The prize was awarded to the four collaborations, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, for their "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".
Among the four experiments, ATLAS and CMS jointly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in July, 2012, and continue to investigate its properites. ALICE is dedicated to studying quark-gluon plasma, a state of extremely hot and dense matter that existed in the first microseconds after the Big Bang. LHCb explores minute difference between matter and antimatter, violation of fundmental symmetries and the complex spectra of composite particles ("hadrons") made of heavy and light quarks. Through very precise measurements, the LHC's four experiments have pushed fundamental physics research to unprecedented new heights.
"I am extremely proud to see the extraordinary accomplishments of the LHC collaborations honoured with this prestigious Prize," said Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General of CERN. "It is a beautiful recognition of the collective efforts, dedication, competence and hard work of thousands of people from all over the world who contribute daily to pushing the boundaries of human knowledge."
As the first founding member of the China ATLAS group, Nanjing Univerisity joined the ATLAS international collaboration since 1998, and has played an important role in the detector reconstruction, maintance, running and upgrade. Especially, in the national key research project led by the chief scientist, Professor Jin Shan from the school of phyiscs, the ATLAS group in Nanjing University has made long-term and crucial contributions to the research "The Higgs shows up with the heaviest quarks" and "More to come on the Higgs boson" selected as one of the 10 physics highlights in 2018 and 2022, respectively, by the American Physics Society. In 2021, Nanjing university joined in the NSFC Excellent Research Group project. Professor Jin Shan, as a key member, is responsible for the physics researches in the ATLAS experiment. The central goal is to measure the self-couplings of the Higgs boson. The Nanjing University ATLAS group has made dominant contributions in the relevant studies. They are well-deserved to be jointly awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
Here is the list of the winners from the Nanjing University ATLAS grup (in alphabetical order): Fabio Lucio Alves，Mohamad Kassem Ayoub，Yizhou Cai, Yimin Che, Shenjian Chen, Huirun Chen, Adelina D'onofrio, Liangliang Han, Xiaozhong Huang, Zihang Jia, Shan Jin, Huanguo Li, Yichen Li , Yang Liu, Antonio De Maria, Tianjue Min, Xin Wang, Chao Wang, Wei Wang, Yuhao Wang, Ligang Xia, Zifeng Xu, Hanfei Ye, Bowen Zhang, Huijun Zhang, Rui Zhang, Lei Zhang, Yixiang Zhang, Jinchao Zheng, Yong Zhou.
