Outreach website

Nikhef's Outreach activities

Want to find out more about our research? On our Outreach website you will find all our outreach activities organised by Nikhef in Amsterdam for the general public, students and teachers. See you at Nikhef!

Go to the Outreach site
Research Spotlight

LHCb: Antimatter and b-quarks

Nikhef is member of the LHCb experiment, one of the detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. Here, together with international colleagues, Nikhef scientists try to find answers to the many questions surrounding topics such as matter and anti-matter.

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Research Spotlight

Auger: Cosmic rays

Nikhef scientists, together with colleagues from around the world, perform research at the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory, an international observatory for the detection of ultra-high-energy cosmic radiation, located on the plains of western Argentina. They do so to learn more about the nature and origins of this mysterious cosmic radiation.

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News

KM3NeT detects the highest energy neutrino ever observed

The KM3NeT Collaboration announces the detection from the abyss of the Mediterranean Sea of a cosmic neutrino with a record-breaking energy of about 220 PeV.

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Technology at Nikhef

Technology departments

The technology departments at Nikhef employ about 80 people. They support the scientific projects by designing and building (parts of) detectors, accelerators, readout and control systems, and computer and network infrastructures.

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Research

Astroparticle physics

Astroparticle physics combines physics and astronomy. In the cosmos, very strong magnetic fields create what can be considered a ‘natural’ particle accelerator. To perform astrophysics research, scientists ‘just’ need to build the right detectors. Nikhef is active in KM3NeT, Auger, XENON1T/nT and Virgo.

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Research

Particle Physics

In particle physics, very large detectors are used to study elementary particles. Particles such as protons are accelerated in a particle accelerator, and made to collide with each other. Nikhef is active in ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb at CERN.

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National Institute for Subatomic Physics

Welcome to Nikhef. We are the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics. Our institute performs research into the elementary building blocks of our Universe, their mutual forces and the structure of space and time.
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Please note that some of the content on our homepage and further pages has not been translated into English yet.

Recent news

19 September 2025

Growing confidence in new physics at LHCb experiment

Thanks to more measurements, researchers from the LHCb experiment at CERN are becoming increasingly confident that they are seeing a real deviation from the Standard Model. “The hint…

15 September 2025

Incoming CERN Director General Mark Thomson visits Nikhef

The incoming Director-General of CERN, Mark Thomson, paid a flying visit to Nikhef on Monday, September 15. During a tour of the national institute in Amsterdam, he visited…

10 September 2025

Ten years after the first gravitational wave, there is a new breakthrough: Hawking was right

Ten years after the first ever detection of a gravitational wave, researchers from LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA (LVK) have confirmed a crucial insight into the surface of black…

Future events

4 September / 5 December 2025

Profile research project: places still available on 5 December

Are you in Year 6 of secondary school, are you very curious about subatomic particles and will you soon have to start working on your profile research project…
3 October 2025

PhD defense Bryan Kortman @ UT

Bryan Kortman, PhD at Nikhef, will defend his thesis Friday 3 october 2025 at 12.30 at the University of Twente. Interfering with the Higgs Boson – Lifetime Measurements…
4 October 2025

Science Day 2025

The Science Day 2025 will be held on 4 October. The Science Day (formerly Open Day) of Amsterdam Science Park is a collaboration of Amsterdam Science Park (Science…