Particle physicist Marco van Leeuwen will become the new Nikhef program director for the ALICE experiment effective July 1. He succeeds Raimond Snellings, who will remain in his role as deputy program director.
The Nikhef board announced this today. Until this year, Van Leeuwen served as spokesperson for the ALICE experiment at CERN, a scientific collaboration involving approximately 1,900 scientists from around the world in the field of quark-gluon plasma.
Nikhef has traditionally been closely involved with ALICE through the GRASP research group at Utrecht University. The research focuses on collisions between heavy ions, such as lead, in the LHC accelerator at CERN. These collisions create conditions similar to those that existed around the time of the Big Bang.
Approximately thirty researchers, engineers, and technicians are involved in the Nikhef research program with ALICE. In addition to analyzing the experimental data, detector upgrades are also a key activity.
The ALICE group previously supplied key components of the inner detector, known as the ITS. Preparations are now well underway for Nikhef to further improve the ITS by adding an extra layer of flexible sensor chips around the collision points in the beam.
For the longer term, work is underway on a complete overhaul of the detector to create a successor to the current detector: ALICE3. For this, Nikhef’s Mechanical Technology department will design and build a new carbon-fiber support structure, and the Electronics Technology department will develop much of the electronics.
“Projects like these, in particular, require a great deal of coordination and alignment with the scientific and technical teams,” says Van Leeuwen, who sees this as a key part of his role. In addition to his organizational work, he hopes to maintain time for more substantive research. “I am and will always be someone who enjoys figuring things out for myself and working with Ph.D. students.”
ALICE is also directly involved in the FASTTRACK program at Nikhef, recently funded by NWO, which is developing new time-sensitive sensor technology capable of monitoring and analyzing collisions in the much more intense particle beams of the new HL-LHC accelerator.
Outgoing program director Raimond Snellings is not only a professor of particle physics at Utrecht University but, as of this year, also associate director of Nikhef and a member of the CERN Council, the governing body of the particle physics institute in Geneva. He has served as ALICE’s program director for ten years.
