Physicists Ken Bloom, Daniel Claes, and Ilya Kravchenko, as well as post-doctoral researchers and students at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, are part of a research team that received the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
The three Huskers are part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration, one of four at the Large Hadron Collider at European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN).
According to the news release, 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”. The prize money will fund grants for doctoral students from the collaborations’ member institutes, such as the UNL, to spend research time at CERN.
CMS and another collaboration called ATLAS jointly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and continue to investigate its properties.
Bloom has been helping steward a $51M National Science Foundation grant toward 19 coast-to-coast institutions since 2021.
Read the press release on CERN's website and more about the Breakthrough Prize on the organization's website.
Additional faculty and students associated with the project:
- Current students: Joqauin Siado Castaneda, Jahid Hossain, Miranda Bryson
- Current postdocs: Changwoo Joo, Andrew Wightman, Antonio Vagnerini, Grace Haza
- Former faculty: Aaron Dominguez, Frank Golf, David Yu, Sudhir Malik, Michael Eads, Greg Snow (in memoriam)
- Former postdocs: Rachel Bartek, Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez, Linda Finco, Suvadeep Bose, Jose Lazo-Flores, Frank Meier, Benjamin Stieger, Shubhanshu Chauhan, Giacomo Zecchinelli
- Former students: Jason Keller, Ekaterina Avdeeva, Robert Tabb, Furong Yan, Ian Reed, Rami Kamalieddin. Caleb Fangmeier, Jose Monroy
