For his laudable work in the ATLAS collaboration, Marvin M. Flores, assistant professor at the UP Diliman (UPD) National Institute of Physics (NIP), was among the scientists recognized at the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
The ATLAS collaboration is a laureate of this year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, along with sister experiments ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), and LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty).
ATLAS, or A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS, is based at the CERN’s (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Flores is the team leader of the ATLAS group in the Philippines. His fields of interest are in particle physics phenomenology and experimental high energy physics.
He obtained his PhD (physics) from UPD in 2017, where he was awarded the most outstanding PhD graduate of the College of Science.
The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is one of the awards by the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences established in 2012 by Yuri Milner, an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and physicist.
According to the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics website, the award recognizes “individuals who have made profound contributions to human knowledge.”
The ATLAS collaboration is made up of physicists, engineers, technicians, students, and support staff from around the world.
The ATLAS Experiment website describes ATLAS as “one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in science, with approximately 6000 members and 3000 scientific authors.” The collaboration is located at CERN and at member universities and laboratories worldwide. In an email to UPDate Online, the NIP described the ATLAS experiment as “among the largest and most intricate scientific instruments ever constructed serving as a general-purpose particle detector. Measuring more than 40 meters in length and approximately 25 meters tall, it was created to explore the essential components of matter and the forces that control the universe. Its state-of-the-art systems monitor particles generated in collisions at unprecedented energies, allowing for findings such as the Higgs boson and quests for new physics beyond the standard model.”