The world’s largest atom smasher has proved invaluable at answering fundamental questions about the nature of the universe, including finding the Higgs boson. A team of University of Nebraska-Lincoln physicists has been part of a multi-institutional collaboration that built the original Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, one of two large particle detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN Laboratory in Switzerland.
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.