Wayne State physics and astronomy faculty members, students and engineers recognized for work with Large Hadron Collider at CERN

DETROIT - Wayne State University faculty, post-doctoral researchers, graduate students and alumni were among those honored with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their work at the Large Hadron Collider at Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN).

The Breakthrough Prize was founded in 2012 and celebrates the most impactful scientific work that promotes the importance of fundamental research to humanity. This year, six Breakthrough Prizes of $3 million each were awarded in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics.

The Wayne State team has collaborated with researchers from around the world involving 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 (LHC).

"There were four large experimental collaborations working at the LHC, and this prize recognizes thousands of people working since 2015," said Sergei Voloshin, Ph.D., distinguished professor of physics and astronomy in Wayne State's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a member of the ALICE collaboration. "Those recognized were authors and co-authors of papers on all four LHC experiments. There are thousands of contributors, including teams from Wayne State University."

Along with Voloshin, Claude Pruneau, Ph.D., professor of physics and astronomy, Joern Putschke, Ph.D., professor of physics and astronomy, and William Llope, Ph.D., associate professor of physics and astronomy, were the Wayne State faculty recognized for their work on ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) research at CERN. Robert Harr, Ph.D., associate department chair and professor of physics and astronomy, and Paul Karchin, Ph.D., director for undergraduate physics and professor of physics and astronomy, were recognized for their contributions to CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) research.

"Our ALICE team analyzed data trying to understand what matter was like in the moments after the big bang," said Voloshin. "The properties of the quark-gluon plasma and interactions of quarks and gluons at such extreme conditions were of particular interest to us including hadron mass generation via chiral symmetry breaking."

"The general goal of the CMS team is to understand how particles are produced, how they interact with each other and, in particular, how they interact with the Higgs boson particle which was discovered in 2012," said Karchin.

More than 13,500 researchers from the ALICE, CMS, ATLAS (A Toroidal Large Hadron Collider Apparatus) and LHCb (Large Hadron Collider-b Quark) teams were among those named as part of this year's Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

"The unique thing about the CMS and ALICE experiments is that they truly cannot be done without this large collaboration. A lot of awards are given recognizing the leaders of an experiment, but in fact, there are over 2,000 people making critical contributions to the project," said Karchin. "In experimental physics, it takes an enormous amount of people to do the project."

This award to CERN will help facilitate further research by physicists and students.

"A total of $3 million was awarded with $1 million allocated to ATLAS, $1 million to CMS, $500,000 to ALICE and $500,000 to LHCb," said Karchin. "The laureates don't receive any money, but it was agreed upon by the leaders of the experiments that the money would be split to support graduate students from each area of research to come to CERN to work on experiments."

In addition to the Wayne State faculty collaborators, there were numerous students who contributed to these efforts during their time at Wayne State. The ALICE team included Ph.D. students Mohammad Saleh, Jinjin Pan, Chris Yaldo and Brian Hanley, post-doctoral students Sumit Basu, Prabhat Pujahari, Ronald Belmont, Maxim Konyushikhin, Chiara Bianchin, Victor Gonzalez, Rosi Reed, Debojit Sarkar and Marta Verweij, as well as retired Wayne State engineer, Oleg Grachov, Ph.D.

The CMS team included former graduate students Christopher Clark, Chamath Kottachchi Kankanamge Don, Pramod Lamichhane, Nabin Poudyal, Prakash Thapa and Shawn Zaleski as well as former post-doctoral students Alexander Sakharov and Jared Sturdy and retired research engineer, Alfredo Gutierrez. Two members of the Wayne State University Heavy Ion Collision group, postdoctoral fellows Milan Stojanovic and Oveis Sheibani also were recognized for their previous work in the CMS and ALICE collaborations.

To learn more about the Breakthrough Prize, visit https://breakthroughprize.org/News/91.

About Wayne State University

Wayne State University is one of the nation's pre-eminent public research universities in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit research.wayne.edu .

Wayne State University's research efforts are dedicated to a prosperity agenda that betters the lives of our students, supports our faculty in pushing the boundaries of knowledge and innovation further, and strengthens the bonds that interconnect Wayne State and our community. To learn more about Wayne State University's prosperity agenda, visit president.wayne.edu/prosperity-agenda .