In April 2025, CMS shared the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with ATLAS, ALICE and LHCb, in recognition of detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties, the study of rare processes and matter–antimatter asymmetry, and the exploration of nature at the shortest distances and most extreme conditions at the LHC. The collaboration chose to donate its $1 million share to the CERN & Society Foundation to fund doctoral students from CMS member institutes to carry out research at CERN.
This year, on October 2nd, the CMS collaboration announced the winners of the experiment’s 2026 Breakthrough PhD award during the collaboration board meeting. Parichehr Kangazian, the physics PhD student at Isfahan University of Technology, is among the awardees for her exceptional work on quantum machine learning to the identify jets at high energies. In particle physics, jets are collimated sprays of particles initiated from a single entity. A challenge is to identify the origin of jets, especially when they have large momentum and can indicate the presence of undiscovered new particles. The award constitutes financial coverage to stay at CERN for a given period of time, extending the algorithms within CMS to identify jets originating from heavy particles, including the Higgs boson.