The Breakthrough Prize Foundation, established by Silicon Valley luminaries including the tech icons behind Google and Facebook, named UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist Rebecca Jensen-Clem and former postdoctoral researcher Maaike van Kooten as co-recipients of the early-career New Horizons in Physics Prize.
Also, 17 researchers at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) were among a unique, mass honoring of over 13,500 physicists who were presented with the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. That award was presented at a star-studded ceremony in Los Angeles on April 5 to honor the winners of the top Breakthrough Prizes in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics.
The ceremony, hosted by British actor and comedian James Corden, was the 11th annual event for the Breakthrough Prizes, playfully called the "Oscars of Science" because of the celebrities who attend. Among Saturday's VIP guests were no less than Gwyneth Paltrow, Zoe Saldaña, Kate Hudson, Alicia Keys, Jessica Chastain, and Drew Barrymore.
Adaptive optics for exoplanet detection
In the Breakthrough Prize announcement, Jensen-Clem, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics, and her co-awardees were credited for having "designed and enabled novel techniques for extreme adaptive optics, which are systems that compensate for the effects of Earth’s atmosphere on light reaching terrestrial telescopes." They, along with Sebastiaan Haffert at Leiden University, were cited “for demonstrating new extreme adaptive optics techniques that will allow the direct detection of the smallest exoplanets.”
Jensen-Clem and van Kooten’s nomination for the award was based on two projects done in collaboration with W. M. Keck Observatory. In their first project, they showed that they could predict the future state of atmospheric turbulence, which allowed them to compensate for the time delay between sensing and correcting turbulence in an adaptive optics (AO) system.
In the second project, they showed that they could use a new sensor in Keck's AO system to better understand the shape of Keck's primary mirror. Keck's 10-meter diameter mirror isn't one monolithic piece of glass. Rather, it's made up of 36 hexagonal segments. Their new sensor could measure the alignment of these segments, and then go on to make corrections by moving the segments into their optimal position.
Both projects, predictive adaptive optics, and using their AO system to optimize the alignment of the primary mirror segments, will help researchers observe fainter exoplanets closer in to their host suns than ever before.
At the forefront of fundamental physics research
The 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to 13,508 researchers from over 70 countries who participate in the ATLAS Collaboration and sister experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The prize specifically highlighted the ATLAS Collaboration’s significant contributions to particle physics, including detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties, studies of rare processes and matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the exploration of nature under the most extreme conditions.
UC Santa Cruz has been at the forefront of ATLAS research since 1994, with SCIPP researchers contributing to:
- Construction and operation of the semiconductor and pixel trackers critical for particle momentum measurements
- Development of machine-learning algorithms enabling particle identification and Higgs boson reconstruction
- Leadership in particle detector R&D and data analysis, shaping the U.S. contributions to the ATLAS experiment.
The active UC Santa Cruz researchers who were in the award list are Tony Affolder, Earl Russell Almazan, Marco Battaglia, Vitaliy Fadeyev, Alexander Grillo, Michael Hance, Jacob Johnson, Alan Litke, William Lockman, Simone Mazza, Jason Nielsen, Sam Roberts, Hartmut Sadrozinski, Bruce Schumm, Abraham Seiden, Giordon Stark, Alex Wang, and Marcus Wong.
"Our team's work on silicon-based particle detectors and precision measurements exemplifies the innovation driving ATLAS forward," said SCIPP Director Jason Nielsen, a professor of physics. "This recognition affirms the high-impact science done at UC Santa Cruz and the collaborative spirit that makes it possible.”
Jensen-Clem and her co-awardees will each receive equal shares of the $100,000 New Horizons in Physics Prize. The $3 million awarded with the mainstage Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics will be allocated to ATLAS ($1 million), CMS ($1 million), ALICE ($500,000) and LHCb ($500,000), in recognition of 13,508 co-authors of publications based on LHC Run-2 data released between 2015 and July 15, 2024.
In consultation with the leaders of the experiments, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation will donate 100% of the prize funds to the CERN & Society Foundation. The prize money will be used by the collaborations to offer grants for doctoral students from member institutes to spend research time at CERN, giving the students experience working at the forefront of science and new expertise to bring back to their home countries and regions.
The four experiments are recognized for testing the modern theory of particle physics—the Standard Model—and other theories describing physics that might lie beyond it to high precision. This includes precisely measuring properties of the Higgs boson and elucidating the mechanism by which the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles; probing extremely rare particle interactions, and exotic states of matter that existed in the first moments of the Universe; discovering more than 72 new hadrons and measuring subtle differences between matter and antimatter particles; and setting strong bounds on possibilities for new physics beyond the Standard Model, including dark matter, supersymmetry and hidden extra dimensions.
ATLAS and CMS are general-purpose experiments, which pursue the full program of exploration offered by the LHC’s high-energy and high-intensity proton and ion beams. They synchronously announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 and continue to investigate its properties.
In 2016, Harry Noller, professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology, became the first UC Santa Cruz faculty member to snag the science community’s answer to the Oscars. Noller won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for revealing how the complex molecular machines called ribosomes translate genetic code and build the proteins in all living cells.
The $3 million that came with this year’s top Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences went to the five scientists who contributed to the development of the blockbuster weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy.
The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki and have been sponsored by foundations established by them. Selection Committees composed of previous Breakthrough Prize laureates in each field choose the winners.
