Science funding organization NWO has awarded Veni grants to three Nikhef researchers to further develop their groundbreaking ideas. Each will receive a maximum of €320,000, sufficient for three years of work.
This was announced on Thursday in The Hague. A total of 200 researchers at Dutch universities and institutions will receive a Veni grant. In this 2024 application round, 1,365 proposals were submitted and 469 were ultimately accepted. Of the 200 grants awarded, 109 will go to women, partly due to incentives for female scientists.
Three postdocs
The three Nikhef researchers who received grants are all postdocs. Two of them are affiliated with the ATLAS experiment, one of the large detectors at CERN’s LHC accelerator and an important research program within Nikhef. The third works with the KM3NeT neutrino detector in the Mediterranean Sea, which was co-built by Nikhef.
Artificial intelligence
The research of German postdoc Oliver Rieger focuses on the use of artificial intelligence and new statistical methods to detect anomalous patterns in measurements from the ATLAS detector. Such anomalies can provide clues to as yet unknown particles or forces. He is particularly interested in high-energy collisions involving two top quarks and a Z boson. Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence is a new priority for Nikhef.
Phase transitions
Canadian Robin Hayes is using the ATLAS observations at CERN to investigate the phase transitions that took place in the universe shortly after the Big Bang. According to Hayes, certain particle processes that have not yet been studied extensively can be used to test the most common theory about the phase transitions at the birth of the universe.
Neutrino masses
Victor Carretero Cuenca from Spain is affiliated with the KM3NeT neutrino experiment in the deep sea off France and Italy, in which Nikhef has played a leading role for many years. His research focuses on the masses of the three known types of neutrinos (electron, muon, tau).
These masses are negligible, but theoretically they cannot be the same. So far, the mass order is unknown. The question is in what order the neutrino masses increase. This could help theorists further in their explanation of neutrino mass.
KM3NeT captures neutrinos from space in seawater. Carretero Cuenca will study the rare interactions of neutrinos with seawater directly. Until now, the deep-sea experiment has mainly looked at the flashes of light from particles remaining after collisions.
