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.