CMS Experiment wins Breakthrough Prize

This year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, founded by Yuri Milner to recognize profound contributions to human knowledge, was awarded to the LHC collaborations, CMS, ATLAS, LHCb and ALICE for their groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the Higgs boson and the fundamental structure of matter. The CMS experiment was recognized for its detailed measurements confirming the symmetry-breaking mechanism that gives particles mass, its exploration of rare processes and the matter-antimatter asymmetry. 

The Institute of Experimental Particle Physics (ETP) at KIT, as the largest university group in CMS, has played a leading role in many of these achievements, from detector development and operation to computing, data analysis and physics interpretation. 

The $1 million share of the prize allocated to CMS was generously donated to the CERN & Society Foundation to support doctoral students from member institutes, enabling them to conduct research at CERN. The prize was accepted on behalf of the collaboration by Patricia McBride (Fermilab), CMS spokesperson from 2022 to 2024.