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 30 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. (Updated March 2025)
Bio
Claes received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University (1991) and then worked at Fermi National Laboratory on the discovery of the top quark. He joined the University of Nebraska in 1996, and now searches for new, theoretically predicted particles at CERN (in Geneva, Switzerland) - where the 2012 announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson was made. A former high school physics and mathematics teacher he co-founded the Cosmic Ray Observation Project (CROP) to engage high school science teachers in the study of cosmic air showers and interest their students in science careers, particularly in physics. Claes explores physics topics inspired by iconic comic book characters, their superpowers, and significant events in their history, in a series of independent presentations to the public.