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Harvard Physics professor John Huth was awarded the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award by U.S. ATLAS, a group of American particle physicists working with the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Huth won the award on July 23 for his contributions to developing muon electronics, which are devices that detect heavy charged particles called muons, and studying the Higgs boson, a particle in the Standard Model that gives other elementary particles their rest masses.

The ATLAS experiment is an international collaboration with roughly 6000 members at the LHC, located near Geneva, Switzerland. Huth began leading the muon electronics branch of ATLAS in 1995, and has since chaired both the U.S. ATLAS Institute Board and the ATLAS Muon Institute Board.

Huth and his collaborators sought to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, which was only theorized until its discovery in 2012 independently by ATLAS and another collaboration at the collider.

Huth said that the collider’s high-energy acceleration of particles allowed his team to study the Higgs boson, and he hopes that it will allow them to tackle broader questions around fundamental forces in physics.

“The design of the accelerator was to really be able to explore the territory of the Higgs, and what we found is that we’ve gone kind of beyond the original remit,” Huth said. “We have more power to be able to do an analysis as we go along.”

Huth was first drawn to experimental physics as “a pure way of understanding something very fundamental about the universe.”

“There would be inviable laws of nature that one could discover, and was independent from human domains,” Huth said.

After eight years of working at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, Huth came to Harvard in 1993 and chaired the Physics Department between 2002 and 2006.

Huth also won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in April as part of a cohort of more than ten thousand researchers who were jointly awarded the prize for their work on data from the collider. He credits his success to a number of collaborators and lab members he has had over the years.

“I didn’t do it in a vacuum alone,” Huth said. “I had electrical engineers I’ve been working with, graduate students and postdocs, other colleagues.”

Huth is now working on improving the ATLAS system to better detect muons and is continuing to explore properties of the Higgs boson. As his lab and others continue to advance research in particle physics, Huth reflected on his impact on the field as a “legacy in real time.”

“There are still new physics to come,” Huth said.

Huth plans to retire from his involvement with ATLAS next year, 30 years after his initial involvement with the project. Though he will step back from experimental physics, he intends to publish a book on cognitive psychology and physics, and hopes to continue exploring physics through the lens of many different fields.

“That’s enjoyable,” Huth said. “Just seeing where some of these far out physics ideas go to, which is sort of the intersection of different domains: something new.”

—Staff writer Andrew Park can be reached at andrew.park@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @AndrewParkNews.