What happened immediately after the Big Bang?
Where can antimatter be found?
Was Peter Higgs right?
How do you construct the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth?
Where do cosmic rays come from?
What do gravitational waves tell us?
How can we detect invisible, sometimes unknown but always miniscule particles with exact precision?
Nikhef is helping to find the answers!
The National Institute for Subatomic Physics is an institute that carries out research in the area of (astro)particle physics. Scientists and engineers work together on research into the smallest building blocks of matter and the forces that act between them. These miniscule particles are studied in collision processes using large particle accelerators, including those of CERN near Geneva, as well as in interactions of high-energy cosmic particles in the Earth's atmosphere or in seawater.
Nikhef is a partnership between the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) and four universities: Radboud University in Nijmegen, University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University and VU University Amsterdam. Nikhef is located at Science Park Amsterdam.
- Particle physics: ALICE is one of the detectors in the LHC and Nikhef helped in its design and construction.
- Astroparticle physics: in the Mediterranean Sea, KM3NeT provides the infrastructure needed for research into neutrinos.
- The processing of data obtained from this research takes place internationally in Big Grid.
These are exciting times for the scientists at Nikhef. On 10 September 2008 the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, was commissioned at CERN; it allows protons to pass through the accelerator for the first time. In the autumn of 2009, following repairs and a winter break, the LHC registered the first collisions between protons. Many people have worked for several decades on the accelerator and the associated detectors, and Dutch scientists have made major contributions to three (ATLAS, LHCb and ALICE) of the four main LHC experiments.
Recently the ANTARES neutrino telescope was also completely installed and it is now fully operational, searching for high-energy neutrinos from the cosmos. The Pierre Auger Observatory for cosmic rays and the Virgo gravitational waves detector are also fully operational now. Further information can be found in the astroparticle physics section.
Nikhef has detailed its mission for the forthcoming years in a strategic plan (PDF format). More detailed information can be found in our Annual Reports.
