Global Physics Photowalk 2025 winners revealed

The winning image

A photograph of Raffaella Donghia sitting beside a golden cryostat at the CryOgenic Laboratory for Detectors (COLD) in Frascati took top honors in the 2025 Global Physics Photowalk. The image, shot by her brother Marco Donghia, casts a human face on the hush-and-hum of particle-physics apparatus — warm light, cold science. Marco has said he turned the room dark and lit the scene deliberately to make it feel “a bit more intimate”; it has been reported that he’s even planning to get a tattoo of the shot. A wedding photographer in a lab? Stranger things have produced great art.

Science meets art

The contest was organized by a coalition of 16 particle-physics laboratories worldwide, each submitting their top three images for a global judging panel and public vote. Judges included photographers and scientists; Dmitri Denisov of Brookhaven National Laboratory told judges’ deliberations that balancing aesthetics and scientific accuracy made the exercise unexpectedly resonant for him — “Photography is one of many ways of communicating to the public about excitement,” he said. The moment captured between researcher and machine felt like the emotional core of the competition: humans wrestling with the invisible.

Other favorites

Judges also singled out images that highlight the craft of instrumentation as art. A third-place shot of a KM3NeT Cherenkov light sensor — its filter shaped like a spiderweb — won praise for connecting natural design principles to high-tech detectors anchored 2,500 meters under the Mediterranean. Photos from CERN’s high-temperature superconducting lab, showing Rutherford cable winding, and archival silicon-strip detector hardware from the NA50 experiment made the shortlist, underscoring that the machinery of discovery can be as visually striking as the discoveries themselves.

The contest is a neat reminder that particle physics doesn’t live only in equations and conferences. It lives in workshops, under microscopes, and occasionally — under a wedding photographer’s softbox. What better way to invite the public in than to show the beauty behind the textbooks?

Sources: quantamagazine.org, Hacker News