UI researcher celebrates landmark event in construction of atom smasher

On Friday, Feb. 29, a University of Iowa researcher joined U.S. and international colleagues in celebrating a pivotal landmark in the construction of the world's largest atom smasher being built at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Usha Mallik, professor of physics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, welcomed the lowering of the final piece of the ATLAS particle detector into the underground collision hall at CERN's revolutionary Large Hadron Collider. The collider is designed to help scientists answer some of the deepest mysteries in particle physics, including the search for the basic building blocks of matter.

Mallik and her group of UI scientists are participating in the real-time data acquisition and the commissioning of the silicon vertex sub-detector. A total of 38 U.S. universities are participating in the ATLAS experiment, a collaboration consisting of 2,100 people from 18 countries.