Bhubaneswar: Eight scientists from an Odisha institutions are among thousands of researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, who recently received the prestigious Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics-2025 for their work in advancing the understanding of the universe’s most fundamental particles and forces.
The three million dollars prize, more than the Nobel Prize’s award money, will be used to offer grants for doctoral students to spend research time at CERN. Bedangdas Mohanty, a professor of NISER, Bhubaneswar and deputy spokesperson of ALICE experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, said this prize will inspire lakhs of science students and scholars across the world.
“The Breakthrough Prize, often called the Oscars of Science, inspires young scientists by publicly celebrating groundbreaking research achievements and recognising the world’s top scientists in fields like life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics. This recognition motivates young minds to pursue scientific careers and encourages them to tackle some of the world’s most pressing questions,” said Mohanty.
“The prize honours four key experiments: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb, for their detailed studies on the Higgs boson, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles, and critical investigations into matter-antimatter asymmetry, rare processes, and the nature of the universe under extreme conditions,” said Mohanty.
The prize recognises the immense contributions of 13,508 researchers whose work, based on Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Run-2 data released by July 15, 2024, helped to unravel several mysteries of the universe. Apart from Mohanty, Ranbir Singh, Sanjay Swain, and Prolay Mal from the NISER, Bhubaneswar, Seema Bahinipati from IIT, Bhubaneswar, Aruna Kumar Nayak and Pradip Kumar Sahu from the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar, and Natasha Sharma from IISER, Berhampur, have contributed significantly to ALICE and CMS experiments.
Mohanty said the prize money will be used to support grants for doctoral students from member institutes, allowing them to gain invaluable research experience at CERN and bring back cutting-edge expertise to their home countries.