�������� professor of physics and UW research professor emeritus are part of an international team that won the 2026 . The $3 million award is shared among roughly 400 scientists, including 18 other researchers from the UW team. It celebrates decades of work to better understand the muon — a subatomic particle with anomalous properties. This collaborative effort could ultimately lead to the discovery of entirely new particles.

“A remarkable aspect of these experiments is that it took the collective talents and experience of scientists and engineers from particle, nuclear, atomic, optical, accelerator and theoretical physics communities to work coherently toward one single goal,” Hertzog said. “Together, we measured a property of the muon that encapsulates almost everything we know about modern physics from relativity to quantum mechanics to the zoo of particles that govern the fundamental forces that shape our world.”

The were established in 2012 to recognize research achievements in life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics.��

Muons, short-lived subatomic particles, are created for experiments by particle accelerators. They exist for a fraction of a second before decaying into electrons and even tinier particles called neutrinos. During their short life, muons exhibit magnetic properties that deviate slightly from the – the leading theory that describes the particles and forces that make up the universe, along with anything that exists that has not yet been discovered.

The experiments recognized by the Breakthrough Prize represent 60-plus years of work to find out exactly how far the muon’s magnetism strays from Standard Model predictions. The first experiments began in 1959 at the, also called CERN.��

Hertzog’s group at the University of Illinois was involved in a later experiment at the in the mid-1990s. He joined the faculty at UW in 2010 and helped develop a new experiment at (Fermilab) that in 2025 with record-setting precision.��

While Hertzog and others have now completed their experimental measurements, theorists  continue to refine the predictions of the Standard Model. In time, the gap between theory and experiment — where the muon currently hovers — may vanish or persist. If the muon’s properties never fit the Standard Model, physicists may need to explore entirely new theories.��

“No matter where the final theory settles, the comparison with our experiment will have important consequences and give us deep insight into the heart of matter,” Hertzog said.

Many UW physicists have been recognized by Breakthrough Prizes since the prizes’ inception, including a banner year in 2021 that also featured a win in the life sciences category by Nobel Prize laureate , a UW professor of biochemistry.

“The Breakthrough Prize has previously recognized UW physicists for work that deepened our understanding of gravity, dark energy and dark matter,” said , UW divisional dean of natural sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. “This latest recognition is a testament to the value of large-scale collaborative physics research and we are very proud of the accomplishments of all of the UW faculty, postdocs and students who contributed to this effort.”

A full list of current UW researchers recognized by the 2026 prize . Learn about other UW wins at the Breakthrough Prize here.��

For more information, contact Victor Balta at balta@uw.edu.

Four �������� professors were among the winners of the 2021 Breakthrough Prize, which recognizes groundbreaking achievements in the life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics.

David Baker, a professor in the UW School of Medicine’s department of biochemistry, won the prize for life sciences, while a team of UW physics professors, including Eric Adelberger, Jens Gundlach and Blayne Heckel, earned the prize for fundamental physics.

The annually awards the Breakthrough Prizes, which were founded in 2013 and are dubbed the “Oscars of Science.” Each prize is worth $3 million.

Baker, director of the , was recognized for developing technology that allowed the design of proteins never seen before in nature, including novel proteins that have the potential for therapeutic intervention in human diseases.

Over billions of years, nature has produced a thousand trillion proteins — the workhorse molecules essential to every life function — each with a unique origami-style design that allows it to precisely lock onto an adjacent molecule to perform its unique function. Then came the Protein Design Revolution, harnessing supercomputing and newly discovered principles of how natural proteins fold to turn evolution on its head.

“We could wait another million years for the protein we need to evolve, or we could design it ourselves,” Baker said. His enthusiastic design community of 250,000 — citizen scientists, Foldit players and gamers — uses a combination of human ingenuity and automated computational firepower. Their latest project is a promising crowd-sourced novel protein that could adhere to a COVID-19 virus and destroy it.

“One-hundred people will approach the solution to a problem from 100 different perspectives,” said Baker, who invented the open-source Rosetta software for computational modeling and analysis of novel proteins. The promise of protein design? Universal vaccines for flu, HIV, COVID-19 and cancer; medicines for chronic pain; smart therapeutics; nanoengineering for solar energy capture, and more.

“I am excited about this award accelerating progress at the IPD in de novo design of new proteins not found in nature to address current challenges in medicine and beyond,“ Baker said. “I thank my wonderful colleagues — undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty and staff — at the IPD and UW, and members of the general public contributing to our efforts through the rosetta@home and Foldit projects.“

The award gives Baker and Gundlach, longtime friends who go on hikes and climbs together, something new to talk about the next time they hit the trails.

“David is very well deserving of this prize,” said Gundlach, who currently serves as principal investigator on the ’s research in physics. “He has really pioneered the field of protein folding in a major way.”

The Eöt-Wash Group, made up of UW physicists Adelberger, Gundlach and Heckel, was recognized for precision fundamental measurements that test our understanding of gravity, probe the nature of dark energy and establish limits on couplings to dark matter is.

“I think the award was quite unexpected to all of us, but as a surprise it generates even more joy,” Gundlach said. “Presenting our research to the public was always rewarding because our experiments are intriguing and fun to hear about, but knowing that a panel of famous physicists selected our work feels particularly rewarding.”

The equivalence principle — the observation that objects, whatever they are made of, fall with the same acceleration — inspired Albert Einstein’s relativistic theory of gravity. Motivated by the unexplained phenomena of dark matter and dark energy that hint towards new physics, as well as theoretical attempts to develop unified quantum theories of gravity that inherently predict violations of the equivalence principle and additional curled-up space dimensions, the UW Eöt-Wash team decided to probe the fundamental properties of gravity with a new generation of instruments.

They took the two-century-old torsion balance concept and developed it into a supremely sensitive 21st-century instrument to look for new fundamental physics. They tested the equivalence principle, the inverse square law, and measured the gravitational constant with unprecedented precision and sensitivity.��For example, their latest inverse-square law test probed gravity at ultra-short distances, establishing that any extra dimension must be curled up with a radius less than one-third the diameter of a human hair.

Last year, Lukasz Fidkowski, an assistant professor of physics at the UW, won the New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Foundation. At least three researchers associated with the UW have received Breakthrough prizes in prior years.

Each year, the Prize is celebrated at a gala award ceremony, where the awards are presented by superstars of movies, music, sports and tech entrepreneurship. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, this year’s ceremony has been postponed until March 2021.

For more information, contact Victor Balta at balta@uw.edu.

Fidkowski’s area of research is in condensed matter physics. This branch of theoretical physics explores the behavior of systems with many degrees of freedom, such as electrons in crystalline solids.

“A key theme in condensed matter physics is that, when you have a high number of particles, the states of matter can be very different and very unexpected compared to if you were dealing with fewer particles,” said Fidkowski. “In these systems, exotic behaviors like superconductivity — or current with no resistance — can emerge with the collective behavior of so many particles.”

In these large systems, the behavior of matter is neither simple nor straightforward.�� Since the particles are so light, quantum mechanics is essential for describing their motion and interactions.�� But the sheer number of particles in these systems makes it effectively impossible to solve the equations of motion and calculate the properties of these systems, said Fidkowski.

Fidkowski and his co-laureates — Xie Chen at the California Institute of Technology, Michael Levin at the University of Chicago and Max Metlitski at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — work on subsets of theories to explain how the topology of a system, or the “shape” of the space the particles occupy, affects their properties and behavior. These so-called “exotic” states of matter include 2D gases and topological insulators, which could have applications in quantum computing.

Over the years, the theoretical work of Fidkowski and his co-recipients has revealed some unexpected similarities between condensed matter physics and high-energy particle physics, which deals with subatomic particles that are studied in high-energy particle collisions.�� This is because both condensed matter physics and high-energy particle physics use the same theoretical formalism of quantum field theory to make predictions.

“Our efforts really sit at the interface of these two fields in physics,” said Fidkowski, who joined the UW faculty in 2017. “It’s brought us a lot of unexpected and exciting results.”

In addition to the New Horizons Prizes, the Breakthrough Foundation annually awards the Breakthrough Prizes, dubbed the “Oscars of Science,” to recognize major achievements in the life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics. The New Horizons Prizes and Breakthrough Prizes will be awarded at a ceremony on Nov. 3 at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Fidkowski and his three co-laureates will also divide a $100,000 prize from the foundation.

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For more information, contact Fidkowski at lukaszf@uw.edu.

Neutrinos may be small, but when it comes to prizes, they pack quite a punch.

In October, it was announced that two scientists who headed international projects to study these miniscule, seemingly ephemeral subatomic particles will . On Nov. 8, these same scientists joined five of their colleagues from other neutrino projects to accept the . The $3 million prize will be shared among the over 1,300 scientists, including �������� researchers, who participated in these years-long efforts to understand neutrinos.

UW scientists contributed to three of these projects. Physics professor led the team of UW scientists with the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada, while headed UW efforts with the Super-Kamiokande and K2K/T2K collaborations, which were both based in Japan. Wilkes was also a U.S. co-spokesperson for K2K, while Robertson served the same role for the Sudbury experiments. The prize also honored the KamLAND project in Japan and Daya Bay in China.

All of these endeavors explored the fundamental properties of neutrinos, which are among the smallest and most mysterious of fundamental particles that make up the universe. They can form when particles collide or undergo decay, and are the second most common particle in the universe, after photons. But scientists struggled for decades to understand whether neutrinos have mass and gather other basic information about them. Experiments at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and Super-Kamiokande in particular showed that neutrinos have mass and can oscillate among three different “flavors.” The K2K and T2K experiments have verified these oscillations and studied them in greater detail.

In addition to Robertson and Wilkes, dozens of UW professors, researchers and graduate students from the Department of Physics worked on these experiments over the years, including the late professor , who began the UW’s involvement with Super-Kamiokande.

This is the third year that the prize — founded by Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma, Cathy Zhang, Yuri Milner, Julia Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan — was presented at a . Prizes were also presented for achievement in life sciences and mathematics.

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