National Institute for Subatomic Physics (Nikhef)

Address:
Science Park 105
1098 XG Amsterdam
Netherlands
52.356359 4.950787

What is Nikhef?

Nikhef is the National Institute for Subatomic Physics in the Netherlands, in which the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter, the University of Amsterdam, VU University Amsterdam, Radboud University Nijmegen and Utrecht University collaborate. Nikhef coordinates and supports most activities in experimental particle and astroparticle physics in the Netherlands.

Nikhef participates in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, notably ATLAS, LHCb and ALICE. Astroparticle physics activities at Nikhef are fourfold: the ANTARES and KM3NeT neutrino telescope projects in the Mediterranean Sea; the Pierre Auger Observatory for cosmic rays, located in Argentina; gravitational-wave detection via the Virgo interferometer in Italy, and the projects LISA and Einstein Telescope; and the direct search for Dark Matter with the XENON detector in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy. Detector R&D, design and construction take place at the laboratory located at Science Park Amsterdam as well as at the participating universities. Data analysis makes extensive use of large-scale computing at the Tier-1 grid facility operated jointly by Nikhef and SARA. Nikhef has a theory group with both its own research programme and close contacts with the experimental groups.

The Grid and Physics Data Processing group operates state-of-the-art computing resources for Nikhef physicists, participates in national and international distributed computing infrastructures, and performs R&D on large-scale scientific computing, with an emphasis on multi-domain security, data processing, and scalability.