IISER Pune researchers among laureates of 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Indian Express

06-05-2025

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, faculty members Professor Seema Sharma and Professor Sourabh Dube, along with 23 past and present research team members, have been selected as laureates of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
Sharma and Dube are members of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration. The CMS experiment is one of the largest international scientific collaborations in history, involving about 5,500 particle physicists, engineers, technicians, students and support staff from 241 institutes in 54 countries.
Along with CMS, this year's Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to three other large global collaborations, namely, ALICE, ATLAS, and LHCb, at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), located in Geneva, Switzerland.
'Each of these collaborations consists of thousands of researchers worldwide working towards understanding the fundamental nature of particles and in identifying and characterising new particles,' an official statement issued by IISER Pune said on Tuesday.
The Breakthrough Prizes are prestigious awards, often referred to as the 'Oscars of Science', given annually in the fields of Physics, Life Sciences, and Mathematics to recognise groundbreaking achievements in science.
As members of the CMS from IISER Pune, the research groups of professors Sharma and Dube and others involved in the work are laureates. Also included are IISER Pune alumni, some of whom did their MS thesis in the CMS group and a few others who have gone on to take up research roles in other large collaborations elsewhere.
According to IISER, Pune's statement, Dube's research focuses on the search for beyond standard model phenomena, which aim to address the open problems in particle physics. Sharma's group focused on searching for new elementary particles which can shed light on yet unanswered questions like dark matter, hierarchy problem, and matter-antimatter asymmetry, to name a few, the statement added.
The CMS experiment is a multi-purpose detector which studies proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The LHC is the highest energy particle accelerator in the world and recreates conditions that presumably existed in the first few millionths of seconds after the Big Bang. The primary goal of their research is to explain the nature of matter and the physical laws that govern the fundamental interactions.