2025 Breakthrough Prize Recognizes Collaboration Involving UT Physicists

May 23, 2025 • by Sowmya Sridhar

The researchers have been working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland on the ATLAS project.

A proton proton collision in the ATLAS detector

A visualization of a proton-proton collision in the ATLAS detector. Image credit: ATLAS Experiment © CERN.

 


A bearded man in glasses and a button-up plaid shirt stands in a courtyard.

Peter Onyisi

Onyisi and Andeen both conduct research using ATLAS, one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider.

“We’re the world’s largest microscope,” Onyisi said. “If you’re trying to look at things that are smaller and smaller and smaller, you wind up needing things that are bigger and bigger and bigger.”

And these scientists are working with tiny particles indeed. 

In 2012, researchers with the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations, including Onyisi and Andeen, announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, which gives mass to particles like electrons. The particle had been predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, which is scientists’ best theory of the universe. (Work related to the Standard Model also was honored back in 2020 with a Special Breakthrough Prize for UT Austin’s distinguished professor of physics Steven Weinberg, who died the following year.) Between 2015 to 2018, the physicists involved in ATLAS helped collect and analyze the data which won them the Breakthrough Prize by making measurements of the particle and demonstrating that it looked like the Higgs boson.

“Those three years represented a monumental effort to study this new thing that no one else had ever seen before and no one else could look at,” Andeen said. 

The ATLAS detector, heavy as the Eiffel Tower and nearly as long as an Olympic swimming pool, helped discover the Higgs boson.

The ATLAS detector, heavy as the Eiffel Tower and nearly as long as an Olympic swimming pool, helped discover the Higgs boson. Credit: ATLAS Experiment © CERN.

A man wearing glasses and a buttoned-up shirt smiles, arms folded, while standing in a lab with equipment.

Tim Andeen

Probing the limits of a model that explains the forces governing the universe might be a significant undertaking, but it’s made possible by the collaboration of thousands of people from dozens of different countries.

“We build pieces of this detector here at UT and other places around the world, and then we all bring our pieces to the site and connect it all,” Andeen said. “It’s a remarkable effort from people from around the world.”

In fact, researchers are currently working on testing pieces of the detector, including at the Physics, Math, and Astronomy Building, that will be installed on the detector starting in 2026 as part of an upgrade to ensure the experiment will be able to handle a higher collision rate and run smoothly for another 15 years. 

“We have 80,000 little chips inscribed with Longhorn logos that we designed with electrical engineers here at UT that are going to go on the detector,” Andeen said.

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson, Onyisi said the physicists have been accumulating data to study more and more rare phenomena as the teams’ ultimate goal is to understand the limits of the Standard Model. 

“With the Higgs boson, we had a semi-guaranteed target,” Onyisi said. “And now, we’re trying to keep our eyes in all possible directions, because we don’t know where the next big thing is going to come from.”

Share


Tags