Our universe is predominantly composed of matter, with a notable scarcity of antimatter, a mystery that continues to puzzle scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The Big Bang produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, yet nearly everything today—solid, liquid, gas, or plasma—is made of matter. This imbalance raises fundamental questions about the nature of our universe.
This issue has been central to the research recently honored with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. This prize recognizes efforts to understand the asymmetry between matter and antimatter, which reflects humanity’s quest to comprehend the basic laws of nature and existence.
University physicists from the College of Arts and Sciences, part of the international LHCb Collaboration, received this recognition for their contributions to understanding this asymmetry. Distinguished professor Marina Artuso, professor Steven Blusk, research assistant professor Raymond Joseph Mountain, associate professor Matthew Rudolph, assistant professor Rafael Silva Coutinho, and professor Tomasz Skwarnicki are among those involved in exploring why our universe consists almost entirely of matter.
The $3 million prize awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation acknowledges significant work in measuring Higgs boson properties, discovering new strongly interacting particles, and investigating rare processes contributing to this cosmic imbalance. The Higgs boson is a particle discovered in 2012 that confirms the existence of the Higgs field—a concept explaining how fundamental particles gain mass.
The prize was distributed equally among four collaborations: Alice, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb—all operating detectors at the Large Hadron Collider. The LHCb experiment utilizes an advanced detector located underground near Geneva to study phenomena potentially explaining the universe’s matter-antimatter asymmetry.
Vincenzo Vagnoni accepted the award on behalf of the LHCb team along with representatives from other experiments. This event marked a departure from typical scientific environments as spokespersons donned formal evening wear at the ceremony. The $500,000 award will support doctoral students conducting research at CERN.
