CHANDIGARH: Four serving faculty members, six retired professors, and several research scholars from the Department of Physics, Panjab University (PU), have received international recognition as part of the large CERN collaboration that has been collectively awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics—one of the most prestigious awards in science. The honour acknowledges groundbreaking discoveries made at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) between 2015 and 2024.
The $3 million prize recognises four major experiments at CERN’s LHC—ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb—for a decade of pioneering research. Panjab University has made sustained contributions to this global effort through its involvement in the ALICE and CMS collaborations.
The PU team includes both current and former faculty members who continue to be active contributors to these international research endeavours. Current faculty members Dr. Lokesh Kumar (PU team lead in ALICE), Prof. Vipin Bhatnagar (PU team lead in CMS), Dr. Sushil Chauhan, and Dr. Sunil Bansal (CMS) are carrying forward the legacy of Professors M.M. Aggarwal, J.M. Kohli, S.B. Beri, J.B. Singh, Manjit Kaur, and A. K. Bhati, who, though retired from teaching, remain valued contributors to these mega science experiments.
The ALICE team at PU, led by Dr. Lokesh Kumar, has played a key role in several significant Run-2 data publications. Dr. Kumar currently serves on the Editorial Board of the ALICE Collaboration at CERN and previously held the position of Deputy Spokesperson of the India-ALICE Collaboration for two years.
The CMS group is one of the very first in the Indian University system which started R&D and fabrication of detector components for CMS. A CMS certified detector assembly and testing laboratory is established at PU, which is still producing detectors for CMS upgrades. Group has also contributed to the Higgs Boson studies during its discovery in 2012.
Congratulating the current and former PU researchers, Vice-Chancellor Prof. Renu Vig said:
“This honour reflects four decades of Panjab University’s leadership in particle physics research. From our first involvement with CERN in the 1980s to today’s cutting-edge contributions, our faculty and research scholars have built an extraordinary legacy of scientific excellence. This is a collective recognition — a reflection of the power of collaboration and the remarkable outcomes possible through sustained teamwork on a global mega science project.”
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”. PU researchers played a vital role in detector development, data analysis, and theoretical frameworks that made these milestones possible.
The prize money will further support advanced research and expand opportunities for PU students to participate in global collaborations at CERN. These efforts have been made possible with the strong support of India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and Department of Science & Technology (DST).