Welcome to my homepage!
On these web pages you find information about my research, the courses I teach as well as some fun after work.
Research
I work in the Dutch Institute for Particle Physics: Nikhef.
My current research focusses on the matter-antimatter asymmetry: Why is there almost no antimatter present in our universe?
I coordinate a FOM research program in which we study this mystery by comparing the decays of particles and antiparticles that contain bottom quarks using the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva.
The LHCb Experiment
Have a look at the event display and the LHCb movie.
Wednesday 30 Mar 2010: LHC collisions at high energy! The LHC experiments have observed the first collisions at the record
breaking energy of 7 TeV. A long video report can be found here, and a shorter, LHCb specific youtube clip is here.
To see pictures of the first events click on the icons below to see images from: LHCb, Atlas, Alice and CMS:
April 5, 2010: The first Beauty particle has been seen by LHCb. Click on
the following links to see an
overview of the
event as well as the x-y and
y-z sideviews.
May 7, 2010: A first Beauty Strange (the "Bs" meson) particle decay has been captured by LHCb. The
Strange Beauty particle is seen to decay into a Charmed particle (the "Ds") and a muon and a
neutrino. A picture of the reconstructed event can be seen here.
In the picture "PV" is the collision point of the LHC beam particles where the Bs is produced, "SV"
is the location where it decays into a Ds, a muon and an invisible neutrino, and "TV" is the position
where the Ds decays into two kaons and a pion.
August, 2010: Click here to see recordings of LHCb event displays.
Summer, 2011: LHCb is operating at full speed and results are presented at the summer conferences. Read here
how LHCb is hunting for new,
unexpected, physics phenomena.
November 14, 2011: A charming surpise: a matter - antimatter asymmetry in D decays?
Teaching
At the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam I hold a chair on the research topic: "Discrete Symmetries in Elementary Particle Physics"
I teach topical courses to graduate students (quark flavour physics) as well as a Particle Physics course to master students of Amsterdam and Utrecht universities.
Personal
I am married to Esther and have two children: Didier and Helene.
One of my favorite activities in my free time is to visit Mestreech.