UF physicists celebrate prestigious Breakthrough Prize 

The University of Florida is celebrating a major scientific achievement as a global research team it helps lead has won one of the world’s most prestigious science prizes—the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. 

The $3 million award honors discoveries and measurements made at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most powerful international scientific experiment, located in Europe. 

The winning teams, including UF’s, have confirmed important truths about how the universe works. UF’s team is one of the largest university groups from the United States contributing to the effort. It is led by six UF physics professors—Andrey Korytov, Guenakh Mitselmakher, Jacobo Konigsberg, Philip Chang, Yuta Takahashi and Paul Avery—and includes 36 members working at the cutting edge of particle physics.
 
Most famously, they helped discover and measure properties of the Higgs boson—a particle that explains why other particles have mass. The group also leads many searches going beyond our current knowledge of the primary constituents of matter and fundamental forces of nature. 

Since the collider began operating in 2009, 27 UF graduate students have earned their doctorates through research based on its data—advancing science while gaining hands-on experience in international collaboration.

“This award recognizes breakthrough results in the state-of-the-art research exploring the building blocks of the universe, the results brought in light through years of collaborative work of many institutions around the world,” said Andrey Korytov, a UF physics professor and a longtime leader in the project.

You can read more about the award at breakthroughprize.org/News/91.