A Through-The-Lens Look at the World’s Particle Physics Labs
At the CryOgenic Laboratory for Detectors (COLD) at INFN, Raffaella Donghia operates a cryostat, which cools materials to a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. At these temperatures, scientists can hunt for dark matter, the mysterious substance that glues galaxies together. The photographer Marco Donghia is planning to get a tattoo of the scene that he captured in this winning contest photo.
Marco Donghia
Introduction
Last summer, a wedding photographer walked begrudgingly into a physics laboratory outside Rome. Feeling uninspired by the intricate machinery around him, he decided to turn off the lights. “I wanted to create a world that was a bit more intimate,” said the photographer, Marco Donghia.
He had been brought into the lab to participate in a photography contest by his sister Raffaella Donghia, a researcher at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Frascati, Italy. Armed with artificial lights, Marco sat his sister at a desk across from a golden cryostat, which her colleagues use to freeze detectors to temperatures colder than the vacuum of space to hunt for subatomic particles zipping by. “I tried to capture the relationship that exists between humans and technology,” he said. “I tell love stories, so for me it’s natural.”
A panel of judges in the 2025 Global Physics Photowalk contest were impressed by the moment that Donghia captured. His photo (above) won first place in the competition organized by a collaboration of 16 particle physics laboratories around the world, from the United States to France to Japan. Dozens of amateur and professional photographers were invited to find beauty in the invisible world of force fields and subatomic particles, which blip into existence for fractions of a second and hold secrets about the origin and fate of the universe. Each participating lab entered its top three images in the global competition, with the winning entries selected by judges and in a public vote.
“I was amazed by how many excellent photos were submitted,” said Dmitri Denisov, an experimental particle physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. As the only scientist among the judges, Denisov worried that his priorities would be at odds with those of the photographers and artists on the panel, but he was surprised to find how easily they converged. The process of considering both visual aesthetics and scientific accuracy helped him appreciate the connection between science and art. “Photography is one of many ways of communicating to the public about excitement — why I’m a scientist, and why we are doing what we’re doing,” he said.
The full list of shortlisted entries can be found here. We’ve chosen a few favorites, whose visual qualities seem in some essential way to reflect the extraordinary science behind them.
Anchored off the coast of France under 2,500 meters of water, the Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) will use thousands of optical sensor modules to capture flashes of light emanating from the interactions with neutrinos, ghostly particles that could help explain why all the matter in the universe exists. The judges awarded third place to this image of a Cherenkov light sensor, which uses a filter shaped like a spiderweb to better focus the signals it captures. “It’s scientists using in their equipment ideas that nature developed over billions of years,” said contest judge Dmitri Denisov.
In CERN’s high-temperature superconducting laboratory near Geneva, a wiring machine combines dozens of strands of niobium–tin to create the Rutherford cables needed to generate intense magnetic fields in high-energy particle accelerators.
This silicon strip detector was used in the NA50 experiment, a research effort at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron that provided evidence for the existence of a new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma.
The Advanced Gamma Tracking Array (AGATA) photon detector and the PRISMA magnetic spectrometer at the INFN National Laboratories in Legnaro, Italy, explore the structure of exotic nuclei produced by the collision of heavy ions.
A recently excavated expansion drift, or tunnel, at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota. This is the first phase of SURF’s plan to create more underground space for next-generation neutrino, rare process and dark matter experiments.
In the public vote on the contest entries, first place went to this photo taken at the Large Heavy Ion National Accelerator research center in Caen, France. The service corridor pictured, which runs the length of the SPIRAL2 superconductor linear accelerator, provides access to various systems that feed its components, including connections for cooling circuits, vacuum pumps, and systems status monitors.
The photographer Yannig Van De Wouwer was searching for an interesting pattern at the Large Heavy Ion National Accelerator in Caen, France. His artistic close-up of the casing of a vacuum pipe that helps maintain the SPIRAL2 linear accelerator facility was awarded second place by the judges.
The curving underground passage at the SuperKEKB particle accelerator in Tsukuba, Japan. The flagship electron-positron collider at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) achieved the world’s highest instantaneous luminosity for a colliding-beam accelerator in 2020.
A switch router enables data exchanges among the thousands of servers that make up the storage and processing platforms at the IN2P3 Computing Center at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Lyon, France. The router handles the transfer of several hundred terabytes of data every day, the majority of which flows from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.
A cavity excavated to a depth of 33.5 meters for near neutrino detectors at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex in the Tokai region. Within the vast cavity is an off-axis detector, part of the near detector complex designed to measure the intensity, profile, and direction of the neutrino beam produced for the T2K (Tokai to Kamioka) experiment.
Industrial gas cylinders at DarkSide-20k, a dark matter detection experiment under construction at the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. At the heart of the experiment is the Time Projection Chamber, which will use 50 tonnes of liquid argon to detect high-mass Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs.
