Intersections between scientific fields, between institutions and between science and education are the focus of the latest Nikhef magazine DIMENSIES, which comes out today.
“At successful interfaces, new ideas and insights arise for both sides,” writes Nikhef director Stan Bentvelsen in his foreword to the fall issue of the magazine. The magazine, published twice a year, is distributed free of charge to relations of Nikhef and the six university partners around the country.
Nikhef DIMENSIES (Dutch language only) is also available online as a browsable pdf (see below).
The fall 2022 issue of DIMENSIES has a major story about the Nikhef group GRASP at Utrecht University. There, two scientific fields come together emphatically. On the one hand, the group works on the interpretation of gravitational waves, which tell a lot about black holes and neutron stars. Extreme objects whose physics overlaps with that of colliding atomic nuclei in the ALICE experiment at CERN.
A second interesting interface is covered in eight small portraits of Nikhef researchers who also teach at various universities. Teaching, they say, takes a lot of time, but also yields a lot. “You will never learn to understand a subject better than when you teach about it,” says the president of the research school of subatomic physics Juan Rojo, himself a passionate teacher as a professor at the VU.
Also in DIMENSIES: an interview with the proverbial accountant of particle physics Patrick Koppenburg, an update on the geological research in Limburg for the Einstein Telescope, and the progress of the renovation of the Nikhef building in Amsterdam.
Plus staff researcher Lydia Brenner’s dream about seeing what the ATLAS detector might just barely see. And research highlights about neutrino telescope KM3NeT in the Mediterranean Sea, a new inside view of the proton and new superfast electronics for detectors at CERN, made at Nikhef.
Previous issues of the Nikhef magazine DIMENSIES are available online. Print copies can be ordered at communications@nikhef.nl.