MEYRIN, Switzerland ? It?s been a good year to be a physicist.
Yuri Milner, the Russian entrepreneur who startled the scientific world last summer when he handed out $3 million apiece to nine theoretical physicists and mathematicians, is at it again. On Tuesday Mr. Milner, who describes himself as a ?failed physicist,? is set to announce another round of multimillion-dollar prizes to physicists.
Headlining the list are a pair of ?special? prizes of $3 million each, one to the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking for his work on black holes, and the other to be shared by seven scientists here at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, for the discovery in July of what is probably the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that endows others with mass.
Continuing last summer?s largess, Mr. Milner will also announce a short list of nominees eligible for the 2013 edition of his $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize, and three winners of $100,000 prizes for emerging work.
The nominees for the big Fundamental Physics Prize are Alexander Polyakov of Princeton and Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara ? both of whom work in quantum field theory and string theory ? and a group consisting of Charles Kane of the University of Pennsylvania, Laurens Molenkamp of the University of Wuerzburg in Germany, and Shoucheng Zhang of Stanford, for work on the quantum properties of solid matter.
The three winners of the New Horizons award for emerging work are Niklas Beisert, of E.T.H. Zurich; Davide Gaiotto, of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, and Zohar Komargodski of the Weizmann Institute in Israel.
Dr. Hawking discovered by a prodigious calculation in 1974 that black holes can radiate energy, evaporate and eventually disappear, a revelation that set physics on its ear and helped reset cosmologists? agenda for the 21st century.
The prize to the CERN scientists is likely to be a harbinger of more honors to come. In July two teams, each of about 3,000 physicists ? named Atlas and CMS after the gigantic detectors that they built ? reported that the signature of the Higgs boson or something very much like it had been detected in the fleeting debris from subatomic collisions in the Large Hadron Collider.
That announcement signaled the beginning of the end of nearly half a century of searching for a missing key ingredient in the reigning theory of physics, known as the Standard Model, and perhaps the opening of a window into a deeper theory.
The CERN prize is split three ways, between the collider and the two teams. The judges awarded $1 million to the collider itself, in the person of Lyn Evans who since 1994 was in charge of building it. Another $1 million will be split by the leaders (known as spokespersons) of the CMS collaboration over the years: Michel Della Negra, Tejinder Singh Virdee and Joe Incandela.
And $1 million is going to the Atlas project?s two spokespersons, Peter Jenni, who led the team for 14 years, and Fabiola Gianotti, the current leader.
The CERN scientists expressed delight at their good fortune, and said they hadn?t had any time to think about what they would do with the money. A few of them admitted they had never heard of Mr. Milner, who recently visited CERN and met some of the scientists.
?This was totally unexpected,? said Dr. Della Negra, who was the founding leader of the CMS experiment.
Dr. Incandela and Dr. Gianotti both said they hoped the money could be used to reward younger scientists.
All the finalists and award winners were selected by a committee consisting of the previous winners.
The winners will be decided by a vote of the judges on the morning of March 20 at CERN and announced in a ceremony that evening.
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