Breakthrough Prize 2025: Key Information on the Awards Known as the 'Oscars of Science'

The 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has been conferred upon 13,508 physicists involved in four collaborative projects at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory located near Geneva, Switzerland.

Referred to as the "Oscars of Science," the award was revealed on Saturday, April 5, during the 11th annual Breakthrough Prizes ceremony. Six prizes, each valued at $3 million, were awarded in the fields of Life Sciences, Mathematics, and Fundamental Physics.

The event took place in Santa Monica, California, and was attended by notable figures from Hollywood, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jodie Foster, and Zoe Saldana, as well as prominent tech leaders such as Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

What are the Breakthrough Prizes?

These prestigious awards were founded in 2013 by Mark Zuckerberg and his spouse Priscilla Chan, former Google CEO Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, the founder of the genomics company 23&Me, and tech investors Yuri and Julia Milner.

The mission of the Breakthrough Prizes is to recognize individual accomplishments, celebrate scientists as societal heroes, inspire future generations of scientists, and advocate for "science for the benefit of all" as a global, non-political organization.

The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to four collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb.

The LHC is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, facilitating the acceleration and collision of protons, which enables scientists to investigate the fundamental properties of matter. The four collaborations focused on the Higgs boson, a particle as fundamental as electrons, photons, or neutrinos. Often referred to as the "God Particle," the Higgs boson is known for giving mass to other particles and is believed to provide insights into the events surrounding the Big Bang that occurred 13.7 billion years ago.

The collaborations focused on the Higgs boson to gain insights into how it provides mass to fundamental particles. They also identified new particle types to enhance the understanding of the strong nuclear force and tested essential theories by uncovering new processes that explain the existence of matter in the universe.

As stated in the award citation, the $3 million prize was granted for their “detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties that confirm the symmetry-breaking mechanism of mass generation, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles… and the investigation of nature at the smallest scales and under the most extreme conditions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”

The ATLAS and CMS collaborations will each receive $1 million, while ALICE and LHCb will be awarded $500,000 each. This recognition honors the contributions of 13,508 co-authors of publications based on LHC Run-2 data released from 2015 to July 15, 2024.

The entire prize fund will be allocated to the CERN & Society Foundation to support grants for doctoral students from member institutes conducting research at CERN.

BREAKTHROUGH PRIZE IN MATHEMATICS

The Mathematics Breakthrough Prize has been awarded to Dennis Gaitsgory for “his pivotal role in proving the geometric Langlands conjecture.” The Langlands program is characterized as an extensive research initiative that encompasses various fields of mathematics, originating from a series of conjectures that propose specific connections between seemingly unrelated mathematical ideas. This award acknowledges Gaitsgory’s commitment of over thirty years to this research, during which he developed new mathematical tools in derived algebraic geometry to validate a significant foundational conjecture in that domain.

OTHER AWARDS

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation also announced six New Horizons Prizes, each valued at $100,000, to honor eight early-career physicists and mathematicians.

Furthermore, the foundation presented the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize to three women mathematicians pursuing their PhDs, each receiving a cash award of $50,000.