UTA ATLAS team shares Breakthrough Prize in physics
Scientists from The University of Texas at Arlington are among the researchers worldwide recognized with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their contributions to the ATLAS Experiment.
The $1 million award honors the team’s groundbreaking work at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization of Nuclear Research, known as CERN—the world’s largest particle physics laboratory—which led to the discovery of the Higgs boson, often called the “God particle” for its key role in explaining the existence of mass in the universe.
“For more than 20 years, hundreds of UTA faculty and students have contributed to a long list of discoveries and thousands of publications on fundamental physics emanating from the ATLAS collaboration, most notably the discovery of the Higgs boson particle that led to a Nobel Prize in 2013,” said Kaushik De, professor of physics who has led the ATLAS project at UTA since 1995. “We are humbled and proud to see our hard work recognized by the Breakthrough Prize.”
One of science’s most prestigious honors, the Breakthrough Prize is awarded annually in life sciences, mathematics and fundamental physics. The 2025 physics prize went to the 5,300 researchers affiliated with ATLAS, who donated the prize money to the CERN Foundation to support future doctoral research.
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UTA’s involvement in ATLAS spans nearly three decades, showcasing it as a powerhouse in fundamental physics research. The University has consistently played a leading role in analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider, searching for potential new forces and particles that challenge existing theories of the universe.
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In addition to Dr. De, key tenured physics faculty participating in ATLAS are Amir Farbin, Haleh Hadavand and Andy Paul White. Other UTA research faculty involved in the project include Blake Burghgrave, Nurcan Ozturk, Giulio Usai and Armen Vartapetian.
“The ATLAS program at UTA has fostered generations of physicists, leading to numerous PhDs and master’s degrees,” De said. “In addition to faculty, many of our students have traveled to CERN over the years to participate in hands-on research and work alongside some of the leading minds in physics. This collaboration has proven to be the best training ground for up-and-coming physicists to learn and develop new tools that further our understanding of the universe.”
Beyond scientific discoveries, UTA has played a major role in shaping the infrastructure of ATLAS. UTA students helped build part of the ATLAS detector in Arlington, which was shipped as cargo on 65 airline flights, each carrying about a ton of equipment. UTA also hosts a world-class supercomputing facility on site in Arlington that supports collaborators from more than 70 countries as they analyze the immense datasets generated by the ATLAS project.
UTA researchers invented a cloud computing software called PanDA, developed in collaboration with Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is used by many scientific experiments worldwide. Additionally, UTA researchers have been at the forefront of developing cutting-edge detectors and software for CERN’s upgraded collider, scheduled to begin operations in 2030.
“This year’s Breakthrough Prize laureates have made amazing strides…showing once again the transformative power of curiosity-driven basic science,” said Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, two of the co-founders of the Breakthrough Prize along with Sergey Brin, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki.
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