University of Hyderabad in spotlight after LHC bags ‘science Oscar'
HYDERABAD: The 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics — often called the 'Oscars of Science' — has been awarded to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN, in which researchers from the University of Hyderabad (UoH) have long played a key role, highlighting India's growing contribution to global science.
At the heart of this international collaboration is the team led by Dr Bhawna Gomber at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Electronics Science and Technology, School of Physics. Her group made significant contributions to the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, one of the flagship detectors at the LHC.
Explaining CMS's role within the LHC, Dr Bhawna Gomber told TNIE, 'CMS is a general-purpose detector, playing a crucial role in probing both standard model phenomena and physics beyond the Standard Model. In fact, both CMS and its counterpart ATLAS confirmed the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.'
She added, 'Our team is involved in both physics analysis—particularly the search for dark matter using proton-proton collision data — and the development of firmware for the calorimeter trigger system, as part of the detector's Phase-2 upgrade.'
The group's work spans cutting-edge domains including data analysis, trigger electronics, and high-energy particle interactions, contributing significantly to the success of the CMS project.
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