8 scientists from Odisha, 5 from Kolkata awarded $3 m Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Eight scientists from leading research institutions in Odisha — including NISER, IIT Bhubaneswar, the Institute of Physics, and IISER Berhampur — have been honored with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, awarded by CERN.

The $3 million (~₹25.61 cr) Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for 2025 is awarded to thousands of researchers from more than 70 countries representing four experimental collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb.

The Break Through prize money is allocated to ATLAS ($1 million); CMS ($1 million), ALICE ($500,000) and LHCb ($500,000), in recognition of 13,508 co-authors of publications based on LHC Run-2 data released between 2015 and July 15, 2024. [ATLAS – 5,345 researchers; CMS – 4,550; ALICE – 1,869; LHCb – 1,744].

Among the awardees are Dr Ranbir Singh, Dr Sanjay Swain, Dr Prolay Mal, Dr Seema Bahinipati, Dr Aruna Kumar Nayak, Dr Pradip Kumar Sahu, and Dr Natasha Sharma.

They contributed to landmark experiments like ALICE and CMS, which investigated the behavior of subatomic particles, the discovery of the Higgs boson, and the cosmic imbalance between matter and antimatter.

Few days ago, The Experimental High Energy Physics (HEP) group of Bose Institute (BI), Kolkata, currently consisting of faculty members – Prof Supriya Das, Dr Sidharth Kumar Prasad and Dr Saikat Biswas, Post Doctoral Fellow – Dr Sanchari Thakur and Senior Research Fellow- Mr Mintu Haldar, were awarded the Breakthrough Prize 2025 in Fundamental Physics as a part of ALICE at CERN.