Fundamental physics moves slowly, and it moves in teams. When a discovery finally arrives, after years of construction, calibration, and analysis shared across thousands of scientists, the recognition tends to be collective. So it is with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and so it is with Associate Professor Siew Yan Hoh of Xiamen University Malaysia.

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Dr. Hoh is named among the recipients of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize as a member of the CMS Collaboration at CERN [2], and again among the 2026 recipients as a co-author of the Muon g-2 publications from CERN, Brookhaven, and Fermilab [1]. Both are large international collaborations spanning hundreds of scientists. His name appears on both laureate lists, a testament to sustained contributions made at two distinguished institutions during different chapters of his career.

The 2025 Prize: The Higgs Boson at the LHC
Work conducted during PhD studies at the University of Padova, Italy, and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM)
The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector is one of two general-purpose experiments built around the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. The 2025 prize recognized the collaboration for detailed measurements of Higgs boson properties confirming the symmetry-breaking mechanism of mass generation, the discovery of new strongly interacting particles, the study of rare processes and matter-antimatter asymmetry, and the exploration of nature at the most extreme conditions ever produced in a laboratory [2].

The Higgs boson is the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, the mechanism through which fundamental particles acquire mass. Measuring its properties precisely, including its mass, spin, and couplings to other particles, tests whether our theoretical framework holds and whether deviations hint at physics yet to be understood.

Dr. Hoh joined the CMS experiment during his PhD, carried out jointly at the University of Padova and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, a programme that placed him within one of the world's largest scientific collaborations at a formative stage of his research career.

The 2026 Prize: The Muon's Magnetic Moment at Fermilab
Work conducted during postdoctoral research at the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
The Muon g-2 collaboration set out to measure, with extraordinary precision, the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. The muon behaves like a tiny bar magnet, precessing in a magnetic field. Quantum theory predicts the rate of this precession should deviate from a baseline value by a tiny but calculable amount, and every particle in nature, including undiscovered ones, would leave a fingerprint in that deviation. It is, in effect, a precision probe of all of physics, including physics beyond the Standard Model.

Experiments at CERN, then Brookhaven, then Fermilab progressively refined the measurement over six decades. The latest results, measured to 140 parts per billion using a 50-foot-diameter superconducting storage ring originally built at CERN and transported by road and sea to Illinois, pushed precision to its current frontier. The discrepancy with theory has not closed. Where it leads remains one of the open questions in fundamental physics.

The 2026 prize was awarded to the living co-authors of the publications reporting results from measurement campaigns at CERN, BNL, and Fermilab, for contributions pushing the boundaries of experimental precision and opening a new era in the search for physics beyond the Standard Model [1]. Dr. Hoh made his contributions during his postdoctoral research at the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, an institute named after Nobel laureate T.D. Lee and dedicated to fundamental physics research.

Science at the Scale of Petabytes
What underpins both experiments, and is easy to overlook in any account of their physics, is the extraordinary scale of data involved. The LHC produces over 600 million proton-proton collisions per second, generating raw data at roughly one petabyte per second [6]. A sophisticated trigger system filters this torrent in real time, retaining only scientifically significant events. Even after filtering, CMS alone produces more than five petabytes of data per year at peak performance [3], distributed across a worldwide computing grid spanning over 100 institutions in 36 countries [3]. The annual data volume reaching CMS analysts is on the order of 15 to 20 petabytes [4], comparable in scale to the entire digital holdings of the Library of Congress. The CERN storage system, EOS, was created for extreme LHC computing requirements; as of June 2022, its instances exceeded seven billion files [5].

The Muon g-2 experiment, though smaller in scale, faces its own formidable data challenge. Its acquisition system must record data from muon spills at a raw rate of 18 gigabytes per second [7], processed in real time by 24 GPUs working in parallel [7][9]. Despite being a relatively small experiment, the collaboration has accumulated multi-petabyte datasets in pursuit of its precision goal [8].

Working at this frontier demands far more than physics knowledge. It requires fluency in distributed computing, statistical inference, signal extraction from overwhelming noise, and collaborative software development across continents, skills that particle physicists cultivate almost by necessity.

The Fourth Paradigm, Brought Home
Science has historically advanced through experiment, theory, and simulation. The fourth paradigm, a term now widely adopted across disciplines, describes a mode of discovery driven by data itself: patterns are found first, explanations follow. Modern particle physics operates here every day, and it has developed the methodological culture to match, including reproducible analyses, shared codebases, blind analysis protocols, rigorous treatment of systematic uncertainties, and open data standards.

Now, Dr. Hoh brings this culture directly into the classroom at Xiamen University Malaysia through PHY408: Data Intensive Science. The course uses frontier experiments, including the LHC, gravitational wave detectors, neutrino oscillation experiments, and the muon g-2, as live case studies for learning how physicists manage and extract meaning from massive datasets. Built on a "physics first, then code" philosophy, it trains students not merely in computational tools but in the rigorous scientific thinking that makes those tools meaningful. The research collaboration norms of large experimental physics, such as version control, cross-checks, and peer-reviewed pipelines, are taught as practice, not just principle.

Taming Financial Markets with a Physicist's Toolkit
The second strand of Dr. Hoh's work runs in a perhaps unexpected direction. His course G0385: From Physics to Finance and his broader research in econophysics apply the quantitative methods of experimental physics to financial markets, and the connection is deeper than it might appear.

Financial markets, like particle collisions, are high-dimensional, noisy, and governed by statistical distributions far from simple. The tools physicists use to extract a faint signal from enormous background, including Monte Carlo simulation, stochastic modelling, maximum likelihood estimation, and random matrix theory, are remarkably well-suited to modelling market volatility, characterizing tail risk, and stress-testing portfolios. A physicist trained on real detector data is instinctively suspicious of assumptions like normality and independence that conventional financial models often take for granted, and is equipped to construct more robust alternatives. This methodological transplant from the laboratory to the trading floor is the essence of econophysics, and it represents a genuinely productive interdisciplinary frontier.

Further Horizons: Muography and Laser Acceleration
Dr. Hoh is also pursuing two applied research directions with direct relevance to Malaysia and the region.
Muography uses naturally occurring cosmic muons to image the interior of large geological structures, much as X-rays image the body but on a landscape scale. Originally developed for volcano monitoring and pyramid archaeology, the technique holds real promise for mineral exploration, infrastructure monitoring, and natural hazard assessment in a region with active geological complexity. Establishing a muography programme in Malaysia would open a novel and practically relevant scientific direction for the country.

Laser wakefield acceleration pursues the goal of shrinking particle accelerators from kilometre-scale facilities to table-top devices. Intense, ultrashort laser pulses fired into plasma generate accelerating fields thousands of times stronger than conventional technology, opening pathways to compact radiation sources for medical imaging, cancer therapy, and accessible experimental physics. Pursuing this in Malaysia contributes to a global effort to democratize particle acceleration beyond the handful of major international laboratories.

These prizes belong first to the many hundreds of scientists who built and operated two of the world's most complex experiments over many years. Dr. Hoh's inclusion in both, through work rooted in Padova, Kuala Lumpur, and Shanghai, reflects a career conducted at the frontier. What he brings to Xiamen University Malaysia is not only recognition, but a set of methods, a culture of rigorous data science, and a range of research directions that connect fundamental physics to questions the world is genuinely asking.

For enquiries about the Physics Department's research programmes or courses, please contact the Xiamen University Malaysia Office of Research and Development.

References
1.Breakthrough Prize — 2026 Laureates, Fermilab (Muon g-2 Collaboration): https://breakthroughprize.org/Laureates/1/L4025
2.Breakthrough Prize — 2025 Laureates, CMS Collaboration: https://breakthroughprize.org/Laureates/1/L3994
3.CMS Computing Grid — Peak Data Volume: https://cms.cern/detector/computing-grid
4.CMS Prompt Data Processing — Annual Data Volume: https://cms.cern/news/prompt-data-processing-cms
5.CERN Storage — LHC Run 2 and Run 3 Data Volumes: https://home.cern/science/computing/storage
6.LHC Data Analysis — Collision Rate and Raw Data Rate: https://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.lhc_data_analys…
7.Fermilab Muon g-2 Data Acquisition — Raw Data Rate: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.00608
8.Muon g-2 Data Production — Multi-Petabyte Dataset Challenge: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1915436
9.Muon g-2 GPU Data Acquisition: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1611.04959