The Italian Physical Society has honoured five Italian physicists at CERN with the Enrico Fermi Prize for their work on Large Hadron Collider experiments.

Award recipients:

• Pierluigi Campana, LHCb spokesperson, for “the first observation, with the LHCb experiment, of CP violation in B-sub-s meson decays, and for a large number of high-precision measurements in ‘heavy flavour’ physics.”
• Simone Giania, TOTEM spokesperson, for “the first direct confirmation, with the TOTEM experiment…that the total proton-proton cross-section increases with energy, and for further in-depth studies on the proton structure.”
• Fabiola Gianotti, former ATLAS spokesperson, for “the discovery, with the ATLAS experiment, of a new fundamental particle with mass around 125 GeV and properties consistent with a Higgs boson, theoretically predicted almost 50 years ago, the existence of which ensures a huge insight in the understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics.”
• Paolo Giubellino, ALICE spokesperson, for “the unveiling, with the ALICE experiment, of the new features of the hottest and densest state of matter ever produced in very high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions, in particular those of the short lived, rapidly evolving and strongly interacting deconfined medium generated in such extreme conditions.”
• Guido Tonelli, former CMS spokesperson, for “the discovery, with the CMS experiment, of a new fundamental particle with mass around 125 GeV and properties consistent with a Higgs boson, theoretically predicted almost 50 years ago, the existence of which ensures a huge insight in the understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics.”

This award was established 12 years ago, in honour of Enrico Fermi’s 100th birthday, to recognize particularly outstanding work done by members of the Italian Physical Society.