IISER Pune researchers among Laureates of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Pune, 6th May 2025: The CMS Collaboration, of which the research groups of Prof. Seema Sharma and Prof. Sourabh Dube from IISER Pune are members, is among the experimental collaborations selected to receive the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, announced earlier this year in April.

The Breakthrough Prizes are prestigious awards given annually in the fields of Physics, Life Sciences, and Mathematics to recognise groundbreaking achievements in science. As has been the tradition, the awards for 2025 were released in a star-spangled celebration in Los Angeles, California, USA.

This year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to four large global collaborations, namely, ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Each of these collaborations consists of thousands of researchers worldwide working towards understanding the fundamental nature of particles and in identifying and characterising new particles.

The co-authors of publications based on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Run-2 data released between 2015 and July 15, 2024, at the experimental collaborations ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb, are all considered laureates of this prize. These teams were recognised for their comprehensive studies on the Higgs Boson and other particles, which have contributed to our understanding of particle physics.

As members of the CMS from IISER Pune, the research groups of Prof. Seema Sharma and Prof. Sourabh Dube and the respective group members who were involved in the work are laureates. Also among the laureates are IISER Pune alumni, some of whom did their MS thesis in the CMS group and a few others who have gone on to take up research roles in other large collaborations elsewhere. All laureates and contributors are listed below.

Faculty Members
Sourabh Dube, Seema Sharma
PhD Students (Past and Present)
Shubhanshu Chauhan (2019), Prachurjya Hazarika, Vinay Hegde (2019), Bhumika Kansal (2024), Anshul Kapoor (2019), Kunal Kothekar (2019), Arnab Laha, Shubham Pandey (2022), Aditee Rane (2019), Angira Rastogi (2022), Alpana Sirohi (2025), Kumar Yash Vaish
IISER Pune Alumni who did MS Thesis with the CMS Group at IISER Pune
Prachi Atmasiddha (2017), Irene Dutta (2017), Divya Gadkari (2017), Niramay Gogate (2020), Sai Neha Santpur (2016)
Other IISER Pune Alumni
Abhijith Gandrakota, Prasham Jain, Murli Kartik Maurya, Nukulsinh Parmar, Sreelakshmi Sindhu, Mangesh Sonawane

More Details
IISER Pune faculty members Prof. Sourabh Dube and Prof. Seema Sharma are members of the CMS Collaboration. The CMS experiment is a multi-purpose detector which studies proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) located in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC is the highest energy particle accelerator in the world and recreates conditions that presumably existed in the first few millionths of seconds after the Big Bang. The primary goal of their research is to explain the nature of matter and the physical laws that govern the fundamental interactions.

Prof. Sourabh Dube’s research focuses on the search for beyond standard model (BSM) phenomena, which aim to address the open problems in particle physics. The large Run-2 13-TeV dataset collected by the LHC experiments during 2015–2018 (Run 2) has an incredible discovery potential. In Run 2 of the LHC, Prof. Dube focused on two specific BSM models: the type-III Seesaw model, and models of vector-like leptons. Both of these generate multilepton final states, and their Run 2 results were the strongest constraints on both of these models. Prof. Dube is also interested in various multivariate algorithms and their applications in HEP. These include various types of neural networks as well as dimensionality reduction algorithms.

Prof. Seema Sharma’s group is focused on searching for new elementary particles which can shed light on yet unanswered questions like dark matter, hierarchy problem, and matter-antimatter asymmetry, to name a few. The group has presented the most stringent constraints on the supersymmetric partners of gluinos, quarks and electroweak bosons using the Run 2 dataset in missing energy with or without photons in the final states. They are investigating rare BSM decays of the Higgs bosons to axions which in turn decay to pairs of photons using graph neural networks. They are also working on the state-of-the-art CMS High Granularity Calorimeter, which will be used in the High Luminosity operations of the LHC (HL-LHC), scheduled to commence later this decade.