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The ATLAS Collaboration at CERN has been awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for its pioneering studies of the high-energy collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The prize, shared with the ALICE, CMS and LHCb Collaborations, recognises the extraordinary contributions of 13,508 international researchers who have pushed the boundaries of particle physics to unprecedented heights. The prize celebrates the collaborative effort to establish the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism of spontaneous electroweak symmetry breaking, test the Standard Model with remarkable precision, uncover rare and exotic particle interactions, and search for new physics phenomena that could reshape our understanding of the universe. Through the CERN & Society Foundation, the prize will fund PhD scholarships to support the next generation of ATLAS scientists as they build on this legacy of discovery. “The Breakthrough Prize is a testament to the dedication and ingenuity of the ATLAS Collaboration and our colleagues across the LHC experiments,” says Stephane Willocq, ATLAS Spokesperson (University of Massachusetts Amherst). “In particular, Run 2 was a transformative period for particle physics. The results we achieved with its dataset have deepened our understanding of the Higgs boson, the Standard Model and the fundamental symmetries of Nature.” Probing new frontiers with Run 2 Let’s turn back the clock to 2012, when the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations announced the discovery of a brand-new particle: the Higgs boson. This groundbreaking achievement earned ATLAS, CMS, and LHC scientists, including former ATLAS spokespeople Peter Jenni and Fabiola Gianotti, the 2013 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The discovery of this final missing piece of the Standard Model was a triumph decades in the making, yet it marked only the beginning of the ATLAS Collaboration’s rich and ongoing scientific journey. The second run of the LHC (2015–2018) would be a monumental leap f