The University of Zambia is a public institution opened in 1965 to provide both training and research based on "service and excellence" adage.

The University has great interest in nuclear and high energy physics and is embarked on the research of the proton spin and the quark-gluon plasma using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, United States.

The University is, therefore, an active institute in the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment (PHENIX). PHENIX is an exploratory experiment for the study of high energy collisions of protons and heavy ions, and was designed to specifically measure direct probes of collisions such as muons, electrons, and photons.

The primary goal is to discover and study a new state of matter known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The detection and an understanding of the QGP allow us to better understand our universe in the moments after the Big Bang.