The Human Side of Particle Physics, Captured on Film

Every year, particle physics facilities spend considerable energy explaining what they do in press releases and public lectures. In 2025, sixteen of the world's leading laboratories tried something different: they handed cameras to more than 100 photographers and let them walk the floors.

The results of that experiment - the fifth Global Physics Photowalk organized by the Interactions Collaboration - were announced in February 2026. From hundreds of submitted images, a three-judge panel selected winners that reveal the machines and the people pursuing some of the deepest questions in science.

First place: A researcher and a cryostat

Marco Donghia's photograph of a researcher at the CryOgenic Laboratory for Detectors at INFN National Laboratories of Frascati, Italy, took the top prize. The image shows a scientist dwarfed by a cryostat - a vessel that maintains temperatures within fractions of a degree above absolute zero, designed to hunt for dark matter signals so faint they demand near-perfect quiet from the surrounding environment.

Judge Tabea Rauscher, then creative lead at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, described the appeal precisely: the image uses light to pull the eye through a scene where the technology is vast and the human presence is small but unmistakably central. "The lighting creates a quiet, almost cinematic atmosphere that captures both the intensity and the solitude of scientific work," she said.

For Donghia, who works at a facility that routinely deals in temperatures and energies far removed from everyday experience, winning carried its own irony. "The cryostat I photographed is just a few fractions of a degree above absolute zero," he said, "yet this recognition filled me with such warmth and emotion that no cryogenic temperature could cool them down."

Science made visible

The competition's premise is deceptively simple. Each of the 16 participating organizations - spanning labs in the United States, Europe, and Asia - hosted a local photowalk during 2025, then submitted their three best images for international judging. A public online vote running January 13-27, 2026, selected a separate audience choice. The final pool for the judges contained 48 images.

Judge Dmitri Denisov, deputy associate laboratory director for high energy physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory, noted the second- and third-place photographs were selected for their "deep looks into the inner workings of experiments and impressive display of colors" - a reminder that detector halls, accelerator tunnels, and control rooms are visually extraordinary spaces even to the scientists who inhabit them daily.

Freelance New York Times photographer Will Warasila, the third judge, observed that the photographs "move between abstraction and lived experience - finding form, rhythm and quiet beauty in scientific spaces, while foregrounding the people whose labor and curiosity make this work possible."

The laboratories and what they seek

The 16 laboratories that participated in the 2025 Photowalk collectively pursue questions ranging from the identity of dark matter to the mechanisms behind violent astrophysical events. One facility contributed photographs from a deep-sea neutrino telescope designed to detect particles generated when black holes consume stars or neutron stars collide - events that produce neutrinos capable of traveling billions of light-years without deflection.

The combination of extreme engineering and fundamental curiosity is precisely what the Photowalk attempts to convey. Scientists inside these facilities sometimes lose sight of how unusual their workplaces are. Photographers notice.

The winning photographs and additional submissions were displayed at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, February 12-14, 2026. Previous Photowalks ran in 2010, 2012, 2015, and 2018.