UIC scientists among winners of prestigious Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
Introduction
Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago are among the winners of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The scientists were honored for their work with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
UIC physicists Austin Baty, Rick Cavanaugh, Olga Evdokimov, Cecilia Gerber and Corrinne Mills, along with thousands of researchers worldwide, received the award for their work on an experiment using data from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The detector acts like a camera, capturing “photos” of particle collisions and allowing scientists to investigate some of the biggest questions in particle physics, including measuring properties of the Higgs boson.
The Higgs boson, first theorized in the 1960s, was discovered at CERN in 2012. The observation of this particle verified the existence of the associated Higgs field, which gives mass to fundamental particles in the universe. The CMS Collaboration of which the UIC researchers are part received the Breakthrough Prize with Large Hadron Collider experiments ATLAS, ALICE and LHCb, which harness different types of detectors at the particle accelerator.
“It’s been a privilege to study the Higgs boson using LHC data over the last decade and a half, and I am grateful to have my name, and the names of so many valued collaborators, on the list of laureates,” said Mills, associate professor of physics at UIC.
UIC has been a member of the CMS Collaboration since 1997. Over nearly three decades, UIC physicists have helped build parts of the detector and contributed to analyses of the detector’s data. The CMS Collaboration comprises over 6,000 researchers from 247 institutions in 58 countries.
The prize is noteworthy for its recognition of years of detail-oriented work and its recognition of the contributions of many student and postdoctoral researchers, Mills said. Six postdoctoral scholars, 22 graduate students and seven undergraduates are part of the research teams at UIC that received the award.
“The versatility of the CMS apparatus has enabled a far-reaching physics program that extends well past the all-important Higgs discovery,” said Baty, assistant professor of physics at UIC. “For example, it has allowed us to uncover new features of the hottest human-made form of matter — the quark-gluon plasma — in collisions of atomic nuclei. I am sure there are many more discoveries to come from this exceptional experimental device.”
This work was made possible in part by continuous support from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.