Over 10,000 physicists from all over the world are contributing to the ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb experiments at the LHC, part of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. This year’s Breakthrough Prize in Physics is being shared by everyone involved in the experiments, from bachelor’s and master’s students taking their first steps in the world of scientific research, doctoral students helping to build and run the experiments and early-career researchers gaining initial experience in coordinating scientific projects through to seasoned professors.
In particular, the accolade reflects the successes achieved by the four international teams in verifying the Standard Model of particle physics and theories that extend beyond it. This includes measuring the properties of the Higgs boson and thus gaining insights into how elementary particles acquire mass, measuring extremely rare particle reactions, investigating the kinds of exotic state of matter that existed in the early Universe, discovering over 72 new hadrons—more than a third of which have a structure previously unknown to science—and measuring subtle differences between matter and antimatter. These measurements have enabled the options for physics that extend beyond the Standard Model, including dark matter, supersymmetry and hidden dimensions, to be narrowed down considerably.
The University of Bonn has a major hand in three of the experiments: ATLAS, ALICE and LHCb. The students and researchers led by Professors Florian Bernlochner, Klaus Desch, Jochen Dingfelder, Ingrid-Maria Gregor and Matthias Schott, Professors Emeriti Norbert Wermes and Ian Brock, and Privatdozent Philip Bechtle and Privatdozentin Tatjana Lenz have been playing a key part in building, running and evaluating the ATLAS experiment. Highlights from their physics program include precision measurements of the properties of the Higgs boson, hunting for various potential new phenomena and accurately measuring properties of the Standard Model such as the mass and width of the W boson. For the ALICE experiment, meanwhile, Professor Bernhard Ketzer and his working group are studying how exotic particles form in states that would have existed when the Universe was in its infancy. Professor Sebastian Neubert’s working group, for its part, is investigating new kinds of hadron with the LHCb experiment, was involved in discovering several exotic particles and is working on precision measurements to determine their nature.
At the Research and Technology Center for Detector Physics (FTD), the researchers from the University of Bonn are also collaborating with colleagues from different working groups to develop and construct new, ultra-precise measuring instruments. Some of these are being used at the LHC and played a vital role in the research achievements that are now being honored with the Breakthrough Prize. Both ATLAS’s inner tracker and the upgrade to ALICE’s time projection chamber were developed, designed and—in large part—also built with significant involvement from Bonn.
“Being honored with the Breakthrough Prize is a nice way for this work to be recognized, which makes us happy as scientists and, especially, as students,” the team said. The various teams will use the $3 million prize money to support doctoral students and early-career researchers looking to spend time at CERN.
The University of Bonn team at the LHC is also a key element in the proposed Color meets Flavor Cluster of Excellence in partnership with the University of Siegen, TU Dortmund University and Forschungszentrum Jülich, which is intended to strengthen collaborative research in North Rhine-Westphalia and further expand cooperation between various fields of research.
In this, the particle physicists’ research work is benefiting from the collaboration under way in the Matter Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA) at the University of Bonn, where researchers are investigating nature on completely different length scales to understand how the building blocks of matter interact and complex structures are created.