MLIT staff members awarded “scientific Oscar” On 5 April, the winners of the prestigious scientific award, Breakthrough Prize 2025 in Fundamental Physics, were awarded at a ceremony in Los Angeles (USA). Four scientific collaborations of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, namely, ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb, were honored for their achievements in fundamental physics. These collaborations, which comprise, among others, scientists from the Meshcheryakov Laboratory of Information Technologies, unite thousands of researchers from more than 70 countries. The Breakthrough Prize 2025 was awarded for the results of work performed on the basis of LHC RUN2 data up to July 2024. The Prize was awarded to the collaborations for their “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”. JINR takes an active part in the ATLAS, CMS and ALICE experiments. JINR started participating in the experiments at the stages of preliminary developments, design and creation of experimental facilities, proposals and elaboration of physics programs of the collaborations, and subsequently became one of the major participants in large-scale research conducted by these experiments. The Meshcheryakov Laboratory of Information Technologies made a considerable contribution to the obtained results by participating in the ATLAS, CMS and ALICE experiments in the field of processing, storing and analyzing experimental data, modeling physics processes and experimental facilities, working out physical object reconstruction algorithms and creating corresponding software, obtaining physics research results, and ensuring high-speed network communications. The following MLIT employees were among the Prize winners: CMS experiment: A.O. Golunov, I.A. Kashunin, O.L. Kodolova, V.V. Korenkov, V.V. Mitsyn, A.N. Nikitenko, V.V. Palchik, S.V. Shmatov, E.A. Tikhonenko, V.V. Trofimov, N.N. Voytishin, V.E. Zhiltsov. ATLAS experiment: I.N. Alexandrov, M.A. Mineev. In accordance with the decision of the management of all four experiments, 100% of the Prize money was donated to the CERN & Society Foundation and will be used to support CERN’s investigations of young scientists and specialists from the member institutes of these collaborations. The Prize amounted to 3 million US dollars: $1 million each for the ATLAS and CMS experiments, $500,000 each for ALICE and LHCb. The annual Breakthrough Prize, also known as the “scientific Oscar”, is awarded for achievements in fundamental physics, life sciences, and mathematics. The Breakthrough Prize was founded in 2012 by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri and Julia Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan and is the most significant prize in these fields of science. JINR was already among the winners of the Breakthrough Prize in 2016 and among the finalists in 2020.. More details in the CERN press release.
