LIGO team receives $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.029789
Guardian : Earlier today, the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. Led by Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltech and Rainer Weiss of MIT, the 1012 researchers and engineers at LIGO announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves in February. The Special Breakthrough Prize is a $3 million award given by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, which was established by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner in 2012 and is supported by numerous Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to help raise the public profile of scientists. Thorne, Drever, and Weiss will evenly share $1 million of the prize; the rest of the LIGO team will split the remaining $2 million.