The Breakthrough Prize Foundation announced the 2025 prize winners in Los Angeles on April 5, 2025, local time. A total of 13,508 researchers from over 70 countries, including dozens of researchers from Central China Normal University (CCNU), were honored with the 2025 Fundamental Physics Breakthrough Prize, in recognition of the detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties confirming the symmetry-breaking mechanism of mass generation, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles, the study of rare processes and matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances and most extreme conditions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. All laureates belong to the four major experimental collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) - ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and the LHCb experiment.
The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is one of the Breakthrough Prizes awarded annually to physicists who have made significant contributions to the advancement of fundamental physics. The Breakthrough Prize was established in 2012 to celebrate the most impactful scientific work and to promote the importance of fundamental research to humanity.
As the leading research unit in China, the ALICE group at CCNU had developed a photon spectrometer readout electronics system, a super module for sampling electromagnetic calorimeters, 500 silicon pixel modules for the upgraded detector of the inner tracking system, and a readout link board for the forward muon tracking system. The ALICE group currently has five key members and focuses on experimental studies of quark-matter injection probes, heavy-flavor probes, the partonic collective behavior, and new physical phenomena in collisions of small systems. The research findings have been featured in CERN courier and CERN news several times, among which the discovery of the bottom quark thermalization degree of freedom was awarded as CERN 2023 Highlight of the Year.
The LHCb group at CCNU currently has five main members, who have long been deeply engaged in the research directions of heavy-flavor physics, charge-cum-symmetry breaking (CP breaking), and electroweak physics, and have achieved a series of important results. It is worth mentioning that recently the LHCb team of our university and other institutions in China have jointly worked on the observation of CP breaking phenomenon in heavy sub-systems for the first time, and this achievement is regarded as a new milestone in the exploration of the fundamental symmetry breaking, which has attracted extensive attention from domestic and foreign academics and media.
Currently, the ALICE and LHCb teams at CCNU are deeply involved in the research and construction of detector upgrades. With the approaching high-luminosity collision era of HL-LHC (High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider) in 2027, both teams will persist in exploring frontier topics within their respective experiments, continuing to tackle major scientific challenges at the cutting edge of physics research.
ALICE Team
LHCb Team
Chinese