The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, led by physicist Ken Bloom, oversees distribution of $51 million in National Science Foundation funds for one of two massive detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile ring beneath the border between Switzerland and France where particles are accelerated to nearly the speed of light before being smashed together to better understand their behavior. The university’s contributions to the atom smasher date back to the 1990s. High-tech parts for the Compact Muon Solenoid detector are manufactured at a laboratory on the UNL campus.
Ken Bloom
faculty
Chairperson
Physics & Astronomy
Professor of Physics
Physics & Astronomy
Bio
Bloom is an experimental particle physicist with interests in top-quark physics, weak interactions and the Higgs boson. He is among UNL scientists who work on the Compact Muon Solenoid at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He has been involved in particle physics research for 25 years. Since 2021, he has been deputy manager of operations for the U.S. CMS operations program, where he stewards $51 million in National Science Foundation funds to 19 institutions from coast to coast that work with collider. UNL hosts a “Tier-2” computing center for CMS, one of seven such sites in the United States.
Bio
Claes is co-founder of the Cosmic Ray Observation Project (CROP), started in 1999. Funded through the National Science Foundation, the project has a two-fold purpose: to study patterns of arriving cosmic particles and to interest high school students in science careers, particularly in physics. Claes is chair of UNL’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. He is a former high school physics and mathematics teacher who holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He conducted postdoctoral research at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has been on UNL’s faculty since 1996. Claes uses comic book superheroes to discuss physics topics through UNL’s Speakers Bureau. http://speakersbureau.unl.edu/speakers