The discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating receives another international award
The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has been given to the international team of the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP), in which collaborates M. Pilar Ruiz Lapuente, researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Fundamental Physics (IFF-CSIC).
The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has been given to the international team of the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP), in which collaborates M. Pilar Ruiz Lapuente, researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Fundamental Physics (IFF-CSIC).
The international team of the SCP, lead by Saul Perlmutter and composed by fifty-one researchers, has received three-million dolars —a higher amount of money than the one given to the Nobel Prize (879,000 euros in 2014). Researchers will share it equitably.
In fact, the article describing that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, published in 1998 by the SCP team and co-signed by Ruiz Lapuente, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2011, together with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess, members of the High-Z Supernova Search Team.
The Breakthrough Foundation —founded by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri iandJulia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan— conferred the awards in a gala which took place in Silicon Valley on 9 November.
The Selection Committee for the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics included the prestigious researchers: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Lyn Evans, Fabiola Gianotti, Michael B. Green, Alan Guth, Stephen Hawking, Alexei Kitaev, Maxim Kontsevich, Joseph Incandela, Juan Maldacena, Alexander Polyakov, Nathan Seiberg, Ashoke Sen, John H. Schwarz and Edward Witten.