A team of Carleton University researchers from the Department of Physics have been honoured with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, awarded to the international ATLAS Collaboration for its significant contributions to particle physics over almost a decade.
The prize highlights the collaboration’s detailed measurements of fundamental particles such as the Higgs boson, precise testing of the Standard Model of physics, detection of rare particle interactions and search for new physics phenomena. The prize recognizes the scientific achievements of the second phase of the ever-evolving data-mining exploration of the collaboration.
The ATLAS experiment, located at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, is one of the largest scientific endeavours ever carried out. It involves one of the largest and most complex scientific instruments in existence—a general-purpose particle detector designed to investigate the smallest building blocks of matter and the forces acting between them.
ATLAS researchers study the high-energy collisions produced by the LHC at the highest energy ever achieved at the laboratory. The detector allows them to probe the origins of the universe less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.
“The ATLAS Collaboration’s groundbreaking exploration into the matter that makes up our universe is well-deserving of the Breakthrough Prize,” said Carleton’s Vice-President (Research and International), Rafik Goubran. “We are pleased to see this international recognition of the dedicated, innovative leadership of a team of Carleton researchers.”
Nearly 6,000 physicists, engineers and students from across 40 countries are part of ATLAS. A total of 38 Carleton researchers are the recipients of this award: 18 students and 20 PhD-holding physicists, including seven faculty members.
The USD$3-million prize is shared with the ATLAS Collaboration and three other CERN collaborations (ALICE, CMS and LHCb). It will fund doctorate scholarships to research at CERN, supporting the next generation of ATLAS researchers and enabling further experimental physics discoveries.
Carleton has been a member of ATLAS for more than 30 years and at the forefront of ATLAS research since 2010, contributing to:
- precise measurements of the Standard Model of physics, critical for encoding fundamental laws of matter and uncovering new unexplained phenomena;
- the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle in the Standard Model, and advancing new measurements of its properties; and
- the construction of two particle detectors that have produced significant results, which led to the Breakthrough Prize.
“Carleton scientists have been involved in many aspects of the detector’s design, construction and maintenance to date, including alignment, calibration and performance evaluation,” said Manuella Vincter, Carleton University Professor and former ATLAS deputy spokesperson. “I am proud of the recognition of our team’s international leadership at the forefront of experimental physics.”
The next phase of ATLAS experimentation will be even more groundbreaking. The collaboration will make major upgrades to their detector to cope with the order of magnitude increase to the LHC’s luminosity—that is intensity of collisions. They are deeply involved in the construction of a new high-tech silicon detector covering a total area of about 200 m2, called the inner tracking detector (ITk) for the High-Luminosity LHC, which will increase collision rates tenfold when it begins operation in 2030.
“By preparing the ATLAS detectors of the future, we will be able to explore the possible existence of other spatial dimensions, hopefully observe the particles that make up dark matter and perform novel Higgs boson studies in the search of new physics models that shape our world,” said Professor Alain Bellerive, Carleton-ATLAS team leader.