The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has been providing proton-proton collisions since 2008; and since 2009, this is where high-energy frontier is, with proton-proton collisons now occurring at centre-of-mass energies of 13 TeV (which may be increased to 14 TeV). ATLAS is one of the two multi-purpose experiments optimized for the study of proton-proton collisions at the LHC.
My interests: I led the Dutch contribution to the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson, which culminated in its discovery in the summer of 2012. I now participate in further analyses of its properties, as well as in searches for further Higgs bosons. In addition I work on the topic of b-jet identification, which is important for Higgs boson physics but also for a wide range of other topics.
My interests: search for the Higgs boson, b tagging, B physics.
Despite their short lifetime of only 2.2 μs, the acceleration of muons may be a very promising avenue towards probing particle physics at centre-of-mass energies of 10 TeV or possibly even higher. This is due to the fact that muons are on the one hand elementary particles (unlike the proton), but on the other hand are much heavier than electrons (so that synchrotron radiation energy losses are not a limiting factor in the construction of a high-energy circular collider). In this context, I have previously been involved in the MICE experiment, which demonstrated the practical feasibility of so-called ionization cooling.
The actual collider does not exist at this point, and will not for quite some time to come, but it needs quite a broad range of studies to be carried out, on the accelerator, the detector, but also on the physics programme that can be addressed using such collisions.
In 2016 I started an involvement with the DUNE experiment, a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment using a neutrino beam created at Fermilab and travelling 1300 km to the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. This experiment intends to carry out precise analyses of neutrino oscillations using a giant liquid argon detector, with an aim to learn more about the big open questions in the field: are we dealing with a "normal" or "inverted" neutrino mass hierarchy? Does CP violation in the lepton sector occur and, if so, can it help to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe?
In this context, I participated in the so-called ProtoDUNE project at CERN, which is a crucial step towards demonstrating the feasibility of the DUNE experiment. In particular I was involved in the readout of the ProtoDUNE experiment based on commodity PC hardware (the so-called FELIX project). This experiment successfully collected data between October 2018 and July 2020, and preparations are under way for a second run, featuring various improvements.
| The DØ experiment at Fermilab | The L3 experiment at CERN | The LHCb experiment, also at CERN |
|---|---|---|
 Search for the Standard Model Higgs boson |
Luminosity measurement |
Pad HPD
project
|
| b-jet identification |
Fermion-pair analysis |
|
| VSAT detector |
Last modified: Saturday, 11 July 2020