From an image of a detector hunting for signs of dark matter to a picture of a deep-sea neutrino telescope studying astrophysical phenomena, the winning entries for the 2025 Global Physics Photowalk have been announced by the Interactions Collaboration – an international network of particle physics institution.
Some 16 labs around the world took part in the event, in which they opened up their labs for a day in 2025 to amateur and professional photographers.
Each lab then entered their top three images into the global competition and from those 48 images a panel of judges selected their top three photos while the public also chose their top three favourite images via an online vote held between 13-27 January.
Marco Donghia’s photograph, main image above, was picked in first place by the judges. It features a researcher sat in front of the Cryogenic Laboratory for Detectors, which is based at INFN National Laboratories of Frascati. The experiment aims to detect extremely weak and rare signal such as those produced by dark matter.
“Finding out I had won left me speechless,” notes Donghia. “The cryostat I photographed is just a few fractions of a degree above absolute zero, yet this recognition filled me with such warmth and emotion that no cryogenic temperature could cool them down.”
The image on the left won first place in the public vote. It shows the back of the linear accelerator of SPIRAL2 at the Large Heavy Ion National Accelerator, GANIL,based in Caen, France.
Second place in the judges competition, meanwhile, went to Matteo Monzali for his photo, shown below, of the Advanced Gamma Tracking Array photon detector coupled with PRISMA magnetic spectrometer.
The experiment is based at the TANDEM-ALPI-PIAVE accelerator complex at INFN National Laboratories in Legnaro.
Third place in the judges competition, below, goes to a spectacular close-up image of a photomultiplier from the KM3NeT/ORCA experiment, a neutrino telescope currently being installed in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Provence, France.
This is the fifth international Photowalk following events held in 2010, 2012, 2015 and 2018.
All 48 images that were submitted to the 2025 competition can be viewed here.
