Helping us look deeper into the universe

The Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics (Nikhef) studies the interaction and structure of all elementary particles and fields—at the smallest distance scale and the highest attainable energy. Its work—as part of a global research programme involving the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland—helped confirm the existence of the Higgs boson particle, one of the universe’s elementary building blocks. The same computing infrastructure used for the Higgs research was also involved in the Nobel-Prize winning confirmation of gravitational waves.