The 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has been awarded to thousands of researchers from more than 70 countries representing four experimental collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb. The University of Hong Kong proudly joins the international scientific community in celebrating this award as part of the A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS (ATLAS) Collaboration at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).  The ATLAS Collaboration operates one of the largest particle detectors in the world, located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s highest energy particle accelerator at CERN, Switzerland.

The 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

The Breakthrough Prize, renowned as the “Oscars of Science”, recognises international scientists working in the fundamental sciences. The 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to the Collaboration for its 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 the LHC.

HKU in the ATLAS Collaboration

The Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics Group at the Department of Physics was established as part of the Joint Consortium for Fundamental Physics in Hong Kong. With support from the Consortium and the Research Grants Council, HKU formally joined the ATLAS experiment as part of the Hong Kong Cluster in June 2014.

Since then, the Hong Kong Cluster has contributed significantly to the ATLAS project, including the establishment of a Tier-2 (and Tier-3) computing center in Hong Kong. This center, equipped with 1,000 processing cores and 1 petabyte of disk space, with access to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid — the world’s largest distributed computing infrastructure — supports data analysis for the global LHC physics community as well as local scientific and engineering research.

Professor Yanjun TU: an expert in high energy physics

Yanjun TU, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics, is a long-time contributor to the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. Her research focuses on experimental high energy particle physics, particularly on fundamental particles and their interactions. The recent precise measurements of Higgs boson properties by the ATLAS Collaboration represent a remarkable advancement in high energy physics, which is anticipated to lead to critical and significant developments in the field.

For more details, please visit the official page for the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.