The University of Nebraska–Lincoln has received a five-year, $51 million grant from the National Science Foundation that will advance cutting-edge work in subatomic physics at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest, most powerful particle accelerator located near Geneva, Switzerland.
The grant is one of the largest in the university’s history and will enable 1,200 U.S. physicists from 51 institutions to maximize the potential of the Compact Muon Solenoid detector, an instrument at the collider used to study what happens when high-energy particles collide.
The instrument functions as a giant high-speed camera within the LHC, capturing “photographs” of particle collisions that help scientists unlock mysteries about the universe’s origins and composition and glean insight into the laws of nature.
“No one can do the research unless we do the operations and maintenance,” said Ken Bloom, professor of physics and the project’s principal investigator. “It enables research on this campus and at the 50 other CMS universities in the U.S. The whole international collaboration needs these activities in the U.S. to be successful.”
For more details click https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/