Juan Antonio Aguilar Saavedra, IFT researcher, among the laureates of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

• The IFT celebrates this recognition, which highlights the close collaboration between theory and experiment, driving progress in fundamental physics.

Juan Antonio Aguilar Saavedra, researcher at the Instituto de Física Teórica IFT UAM-CSIC, is part of the major scientific collaboration awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics—one of the most prestigious international recognitions in science, often referred to as the ‘Oscars of Science’.

This highly prestigious prize has been awarded collectively to the four major experimental collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb—for their fundamental contributions to the understanding of particle physics. Among the recognized achievements are the “detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties confirming the symmetry-breaking mechanism of mass generation, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles, the study of rare processes and matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances and most extreme conditions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”

Juan Antonio Aguilar Saavedra, PhD in Physical Sciences and CSIC Scientific Researcher at the IFT, was a member of the ATLAS collaboration until 2021, as a theoretical physicist. His research focuses, among other topics, on the study of phenomena beyond the Standard Model, such as the search for new particles and fundamental symmetries using LHC data. Throughout his career, he has actively contributed to the interpretation of experimental results obtained by ATLAS, in particular the properties of the Higgs boson.

The prize, which carries a total endowment of $3 million and has been distributed among the four collaborations via the CERN & Society Foundation, will be entirely allocated to the training of new generations of scientists. Specifically, the funds will be used to award fellowships to PhD students from member institutions, enabling them to undertake research stays at CERN and thus promoting international scientific excellence.

The award ceremony took place in California and is now available to watch on the official Breakthrough Prize YouTube channel.

The IFT congratulates Aguilar Saavedra and celebrates this important recognition, which underscores the global impact of the work carried out by its researchers, as well as the vital collaboration between theoretical and experimental physics that drives progress in our understanding of the universe.