Manchester physicists share 2026 Breakthrough Prize for muon g-2, marking second year of honours
Physicists at the University of Manchester are celebrating a second consecutive year of recognition at the Breakthrough Prizes after being named among the winners of the 2026 award in Fundamental Physics for the Muon g-2 experiment, a decades-long effort to measure the muon’s magnetic properties with unprecedented precision.
Valued at $3 million and often dubbed the “Oscars of Science”, the Breakthrough Prize this year recognises approximately 350 collaborators worldwide who delivered what the team describes as the most precise measurement ever achieved at a particle accelerator: the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon.
Unlike the Nobel Prize, which typically honours up to three individuals or a single organisation, the Breakthrough Prize credits the full collaboration behind the result. Muons are elementary particles that behave like tiny magnets. Their magnetic moment shifts slightly due to interactions with a sea of virtual particles in the quantum vacuum.
Comparing the measured value with theory probes that quantum “foam” and tests whether unknown particles or forces exist beyond the Standard Model. Decades of increasingly precise measurements now indicate that the Standard Model remains our best description of fundamental physics.
The UK played a central role in the Muon g-2 collaboration, providing one of the experiment’s two major detector systems, developing simulations and software to analyse the data, and contributing to theoretical calculations.
Professor Mark Lancaster, from the University of Manchester, led the UK involvement across Manchester, Lancaster, Liverpool and UCL, and served as co-spokesperson of the global Fermilab Muon g-2 collaboration between 2018 and 2020. The Muon g-2 programme began at CERN in the 1970s, moved to Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1990s and concluded at Fermilab, with the final publication in 2025.
Its goal was to measure the muon’s magnetic moment with ever-increasing precision; even the smallest deviation from theoretical predictions could point to new physics beyond the Standard Model.
This latest accolade follows Manchester’s prominent role in the 2025 Breakthrough Prize, awarded to the ATLAS and LHCb collaborations at CERN for precision tests of the Standard Model and discoveries including new particles and matter–antimatter asymmetries.
Looking ahead, Professor Mark Lancaster FRS said: “Our attention at Manchester now turns to a next generation of experiments that are striving to find evidence of new particles and interactions using novel quantum technologies”.