Bose Institute Scientists Receive Breakthrough Prize 2025 in Physics for Contributions in CERN’s ALICE Collaboration

The Experimental High Energy Physics (HEP) group at Bose Institute (BI) has been awarded with the Breakthrough Prize 2025 in Fundamental Physics as part of the ALICE collaboration at CERN. The current team includes faculty members Prof. Supriya Das, Dr. Sidharth Kumar Prasad, and Dr. Saikat Biswas, along with Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Sanchari Thakur and Senior Research Fellow Mr. Mintu Haldar. 

The $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics 2025 has been jointly awarded to thousands of scientists from over 70 countries, who are part of four major experimental collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb. 

Bose Institute, Kolkata, is the only autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, actively working in the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) collaboration at CERN, alongside several other Indian institutions. 

ALICE focuses on studying Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) – an extremely hot and dense state of matter believed to have existed in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. 

Bose Institute became part of the ALICE collaboration under the leadership of Prof. Sibaji Raha, former Director of the institute, who served as the Principal Investigator. 

Prof. Kaustuv Sanyal, Director, Bose Institute conveyed his warm congratulations to the team members of Experimental High Energy Physics group and said, “This is a great achievement not only for the Bose Institute team but also for the entire community of Indian high energy physicists working in mega science projects such as ALICE at CERN. Such awards will encourage young minds to join this kind of complex and large experimental program for exploration of new physics.” 

The HEP Group of Bose Institute has made significant contributions in several areas of the ALICE experimental program, such as detector hardware development, simulation, physics analysis, data-taking and operations of the experiment. 

An indigenously built proportional counter-based highly granular Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD) was deployed in the ALICE experiment for the detection of inclusive photons at forward rapidity. The PMD was commissioned in ALICE in the year 2008 and participated in the data-taking program till 2018. Bose Institute played a leading role in the operations of PMD at CERN since 2014 till its decommissioning. Post data collection, the efforts of data clean up, calibration and quality assurance of the entire PMD data set to optimize it for physics analysis were also led by the faculty from Bose Institute in collaboration with students from various Indian institutes/universities participating in ALICE. 

A new type of Time Projection Chamber (TPC) is being used after the upgrade of the ALICE so as to cater to the high luminosity environment expected at the LHC facility. This device relies on the intrinsic ion back flow (IBF) suppression of Micro-Pattern Gas Detectors (MPGD) based technology, in particular the Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM). 

The new read-out chambers in TPC consist of stacks of 4 GEM foils combining different hole pitches. In addition to the low ion back flow, other advantages of GEM technology are good energy resolution and long-term stability in operation. Researchers from Bose Institute were involved in the ALICE-TPC upgradation project. 

Faculties and trainees from Bose Institute have made significant contributions to the Physics program of the ALICE by leading about six publications in addition to contributing to several other ALICE papers. Bose Institute members have contributed to several areas of Physics studies. 

Congratulating all the collaborators, the ALICE Spokesperson Prof. Marco Van Leeuwen wrote, “I would like to congratulate the entire collaboration and the LHC community for this well-deserved recognition of the scientific advancements achieved through our collective efforts. All authors of publications based on Run 2 data up to 15 July 2024 will be listed as laureates.” 

Prof. Sanjay Kumar Ghosh, Dr. Rathijit Biswas, Dr. Abhi Modak, Dr. Debjani Banerjee, Dr. Prottoy Das, and Dr. Md. Asif Bhatt were also valued members of this group.  

The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has been shared among the four major LHC collaborations in recognition of their contributions based on LHC Run-2 data (2015 to 15 July 2024), involving 13,508 co-authors. The prize money has been distributed as follows: 

ATLAS: $1 million (5,345 researchers) 

CMS: $1 million (4,550 researchers) 

ALICE: $500,000 (1,869 researchers) 

LHCb: $500,000 (1,744 researchers) 

Part of the prize fund will be used to fund a Breakthrough Prize Studentship, enabling selected PhD students to spend up to two years at CERN while conducting their doctoral research. 

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