NIKHEF - The National Institute for Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics

NIKHEF is the National Institute for Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics in the Netherlands, in which the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM), the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA), the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA), the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (RU) and the Universiteit Utrecht (UU) collaborate. NIKHEF co-ordinates and supports all activities in experimental subatomic (high energy) physics in the Netherlands.

NIKHEF participates in the preparation of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, notably Atlas, LHCb and Alice. NIKHEF is actively involved in experiments in the USA (D0 at FNAL, BaBar at SLAC and STAR at RHIC), in Germany at DESY (Zeus, Hermes and Hera-b) and at CERN (Delphi, L3 and the heavy ion fixed target programme). Furthermore astroparticle physics is part of NIKHEF's scientific programme, in particular through participation in the Antares project: a detector to be built in the Mediterranean. Detector R&D, design and construction of detectors and the data-analysis take place at the laboratory located in Sciencepark Amsterdam as well as at the participating universities. NIKHEF has a theory group with both its own research programme and close contacts with the experimental groups.

The academic staff consists of about 120 physicists of whom more than half are Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows. Technical support is provided by well equipped mechanical, electronic and information technology departments with a total staff of about 100.