IISER Pune researchers among laureates of 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Along with CMS, this year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to three other large global collaborations, namely, ALICE, ATLAS, and LHCb, at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), located in Geneva, Switzerland.

“Each of these collaborations consists of thousands of researchers worldwide working towards understanding the fundamental nature of particles and in identifying and characterising new particles,” an official statement issued by IISER Pune said on Tuesday.

The Breakthrough Prizes are prestigious awards, often referred to as the ‘Oscars of Science’, given annually in the fields of Physics, Life Sciences, and Mathematics to recognise groundbreaking achievements in science.

As members of the CMS from IISER Pune, the research groups of professors Sharma and Dube and others involved in the work are laureates. Also included are IISER Pune alumni, some of whom did their MS thesis in the CMS group and a few others who have gone on to take up research roles in other large collaborations elsewhere.

According to IISER, Pune’s statement, Dube’s research focuses on the search for beyond standard model phenomena, which aim to address the open problems in particle physics. Sharma’s group focused on searching for new elementary particles which can shed light on yet unanswered questions like dark matter, hierarchy problem, and matter-antimatter asymmetry, to name a few, the statement added.

According to Prof Dube, the award is important recognition for the hard work of a very large number of scientists. “It is heartening that the PhD students are included in the awardees list – their dedication is crucial to the success of the experiments.The IISER Pune CMS group has made a difference on the international scale in just a decade of existence. Students graduating from the group have gone on to work on a variety of other international particle physics experiments and industries such as satellite communication and detecting banking fraud,” Prof Dube added.

The CMS experiment

The CMS experiment is a multi-purpose detector which studies proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The LHC is the highest energy particle accelerator in the world and recreates conditions that presumably existed in the first few millionths of seconds after the Big Bang. The primary goal of their research is to explain the nature of matter and the physical laws that govern the fundamental interactions.