JADS meets CERN

About the speakers
Both Wouter Verkerke and Ivo van Vulpen are researchers at Nikhef, the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics. The institute performs research into the elementary building blocks of our Universe, their mutual forces and the structure of space and time. With experiments involving particle accelerators – such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva – scientists try to answer questions relating to new particles that emerge during collisions involving high energies (including the Higgs particle) and dark matter. Wouter and Ivo were part of the collaboration that was involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Ivo’s research is focussed, as a member of the Atlas experiment, on analyzing proton-proton collissions at the LHC. He is particularly interested in studying the properties of the Higgs boson using the data collected with the Atlas experiment at CERN. As a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam Ivo teaches (particle) physics to bachelor and master students. Ivo is the author of a popular science book on particle physics: 'De melodie van de natuur' (Atlas Contact , 2018, English translation in 2019).

The focus of Wouter's research is on advanced data analysis in particle physics and astroparticle physics. Millions of interactions take place in the detectors every second, resulting in data flows in the order of gigabytes per second. As the amount of data being produced continues to grow, data analysis is becoming ever more complex, with an increasingly important role for big data and grid computing. In his research, Wouter focusses particularly on the influence of systematic uncertainties in results and in combinations of results of different experiments.