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Gravitational waves team shares 3-mln-dollar prize

Xinhua, May 5, 2016 Adjust font size:

A Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to international scientists contributing to the landmark discovery of gravitational wave, organizers announced on Tuesday.

The three founders of U.S.-led Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and 1,012 contributors to the detection of gravitational wave will divide a prize of 3 million U.S. dollars, according to the Selection Committee of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Scientists working with LIGO and its sister experiment in Europe, the Virgo Collaboration, announced in February that they observed a gravitational wave from the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away.

The first-ever detection of gravitational wave, the existence of which is predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, has been hailed as a momentous event in physics.

The Special Breakthrough Prize can be conferred at any time in recognition of an extraordinary scientific achievement, said the selection committee. The special prize is in addition to the annual Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

The three leaders of LIGO, Ronald Drever and Kip Thorne of California Institute of Technology, and Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will equally split 1 million dollars.

The contributors equally sharing the remaining 2 million dollars include 1,005 authors of the paper describing the discovery of gravitational waves, which was published in Physical Review Letters in February.

They are from 133 international institutions involved in LIGO and Virgo Collaboration, including China's Tsinghua University.

Also sharing the prize are seven scientists who made important contributions to the success of LIGO.

The laureates will be recognized at the 2017 Breakthrough Prize ceremony in this fall, where the annual Breakthrough Prize in the field of fundamental physics, life sciences and mathematics will also be presented.

Founded in 2013, the Breakthrough Prizes aim to honor the world's top scientists with each prize totalling 3 million dollars. The sponsors of the fund include Russian tech tycoon Yuri Milner, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Alibaba founder Jack Ma. Endi