IFIC is a joint center of CSIC and the University of Valencia devoted to research in Particle, Astroparticle and Nuclear Physics and its applications to other fields of Science and Technology. IFIC covers both the theoretical and experimental aspects of these fields. Among its goals are the study of the Higgs boson, the top quark, the search for new particles and theoretical models, the study of the neutrino properties and their use as cosmic messengers, the research on nuclear physics and its applications, as well as the development of technology for new particle detectors and accelerators. Starting back in the 1950s, IFIC is nowadays a pioneering center in Spain in research of the constituents of matter.
Concerning Physics at Colliders, IFIC has been involved in the design, construction, operation and physics exploitation of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). IFIC also participates in the LHCb and MoEDAL experiments at LHC, and contributes to the distributed computing network (GRID) for the LHC and other scientific activities. IFIC is also deeply involved in the R&D detector developments towards the High Luminosity upgrade of the LHC, and participates in the preparation for the future Linear Collider (ILC and CLIC) under the framework of the Linear Collider Collaboration (LCC).
In Neutrino Physics, IFIC participates in the ANTARES and KM3NeT neutrino telescopes, in the accelerator-based neutrino-oscillation T2K experiment and the next generation DUNE experiment, and plays a leading role in the NEXT detector and its search for neutrinoless double beta decay. In Nuclear Physics, IFIC contributes to FAIR, the future European facility for nuclear research, by building one of its main detectors, AGATA, as well as leads the BRIKEN experiment and participates in the nTOF experiment at CERN. The IFIC research group on Medical Physics carries out activities related to medical imaging and accelerator developments.
IFIC produces every year a wide variety of theoretical studies, both in the frame of the Standard Model which describes elementary particles and their interactions, as well as in models that explore new physical phenomena. Other theoretical areas cover Nuclear and Many-body Physics, Astroparticle Physics and Cosmology. Most research in theoretical physics is focused on present or future experiments.