The prestigious Breakthrough Prize was awarded this year to the Atlas experiment at the Ceren particle accelerator, which involves about a hundred Israeli researchers.

History at the world's largest particle accelerator: The International Breakthrough Foundation announced that the prestigious prize in fundamental physics was awarded this year to the four main experiments at the particle accelerator: LHC ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb. In total, there are 13,000 winners. The ATLAS experiment involves four groups from Israel, numbering about 100 researchers. One of them is the Tel Aviv University research group, which has been a member of the experiment from its beginning. The group includes faculty members: Prof. Erez Etzion, Prof. Halina Abramowitz, Prof. Avner Sofer, Prof. Yan Ben Hamo, Dr. Gideon Bala, Prof. Liron Barak and Dr. Igor Zolkin, alongside postdoctoral fellows, doctoral students, master's students and technicians.

"The prize is very prestigious, and quite new – it was first awarded in 2012," says Prof. Etzion from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University. "In 2013, the ATLAS and CMS experiments already won this prize for the discovery of the Higgs particle, but while the speakers of the two experiments received the prize then as representatives of the other researchers, this time it was decided, as a precedent, to award the prize to all the researchers involved in the four experiments. Among the winners were Dr. Adi Ashkenazi and Dr. Noam Tal Hod, who participated in the ATLAS experiment as part of their doctoral work at Tel Aviv University, and are now faculty members at Tel Aviv and the Weizmann Institute. Furthermore, the prize was also awarded to many Tel Aviv University graduates who were members of ATLAS as students and are now senior figures in Israeli industry."

Tel Aviv University, the Weizmann Institute, and the Technion have been involved in the ATLAS experiment since its inception in the early 2012s, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev recently joined. In 50, after decades of searching at various accelerators, the ATLAS and CMS experiments discovered the Higgs boson. The existence of this particle was predicted back in the XNUMXs, when teams of theoretical physicists – including Peter Higgs, Robert Braut, and François Engler (who is a professor with a special appointment at Tel Aviv University) – proposed a mathematical model that explains the origin of the masses of elementary particles. The discovery of the Higgs boson, some XNUMX years after it was predicted, completed the Standard Model of particle physics and opened a new frontier in the study of the universe in the form of precise measurements of the properties of this particle.

"This prize gives some satisfaction to Israeli science," says Prof. Etzion. "Israeli researchers have been key partners in measurements and searches – especially in precise measurements of the Higgs particle and in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model. For example, Israeli researchers led the measurements of the Higgs decaying into charm quarks, using dedicated machine learning technologies. In another example, Israeli researchers were at the forefront of the search for long-lived particles, predicted by theories designed to explain phenomena beyond the Standard Model. In addition, the experimental groups that won the prize have fruitful collaborations with theoretical physicists from Israel who have helped predict the results of measurements and even build computational tools for research."

The Breakthrough Fund was founded in 2012 by Israeli-Russian businessman Yuri Milner. The annual prize awarded by the fund is three million dollars. Of this amount, the ATLAS experiment will receive one million dollars. As with the previous award in 2013, the prize money will be transferred to the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), which will distribute it as scholarships for doctoral students – scholarships that will allow students to work at the world's largest particle accelerator for periods of up to two years.

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