Postdoc position in experimental particle physics

Nikhef is the national institute for subatomic physics in the Netherlands. At Nikhef, approximately 220 physicists and 80 technical staff work together in an open and international scientific environment. Together they perform theoretical and experimental research in the fields of particle and astroparticle physics. Nikhef is a partnership between six major Dutch universities and NWO-I Foundation, the Institutes Organization of the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Among the research collaborations Nikhef participates in are the ALICE, ATLAS and LHCb experiments at CERN, the KM3

NeT neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean, the Virgo gravitational waves interferometer in Pisa, the Xenon-nT dark matter experiment in Gran Sasso, the Pierre Auger cosmic ray observatory in Argentina, and the eEDM research programme in Groningen. There are also scientific groups on Theory, Physics Data Processing and Detector R&D. Nikhef avails over excellently equipped technical departments in mechanics, electronics and computing.

The Nikhef ATLAS group
The Nikhef ATLAS group consists of a total of 15 scientific staff, typically 5 postdocs and 15 PhD students. As a founding member of the ATLAS collaboration, the group has a long-term involvement in detector construction (the semiconductor tracker, barrel muon chambers, readout, alignment, and data acquisition).

For the phase-2 upgrade ), we will instrument and commission one of the end-caps of a new all-silicon inner tracking system (ITk) in Amsterdam, commission the High Granularity Timing Detector (HGTD), and develop the new universal readout system (FELIX) for ATLAS detector systems.

The group also has a strong record in track reconstruction, flavour tagging algorithm development as well as physics data analysis, with a focus on Higgs boson physics, top quark physics, and searches for new physics signatures.

About the University of Amsterdam
The Faculty of Science has a student body of around 8,000, as well as 1,800 members of staff working in education, research or support services. Researchers and students at the Faculty of Science are fascinated by every aspect of how the world works, be it elementary particles, the birth of the universe or the functioning of the brain.

The Institute of Physics (IoP) is located in the centre of the Amsterdam Science Park. The IoP – as part of the Faculty of Science – is housed in a modern building with excellent labs and technical facilities. Surrounded by several national research institutes and with our partners at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the institute is part of a strong physics centre of international standing.

One of the institutes that the IoP has very close ties to is Nikhef, the national institute for subatomic physics in The Netherlands. The present vacancy is fully embedded in the ATLAS group of Nikhef.

Dark matter makes up about a quarter of the Universe, but its fundamental nature remains unknown. It may consist of fundamental particles that interact through new forces in a dark sector. Such forces can give rise to bound states, analogous in some respects to atoms or positronium, involving dark-matter particles, other dark-sector particles, or both. These dark-sector bound states may be produced at the Large Hadron Collider and can yield distinctive signatures, including particles that travel a measurable distance before decaying and, in some scenarios, missing transverse momentum.

We invite applications for a postdoctoral researcher position in experimental particle physics to join the NWO-funded project Reconstructing 25% of the Universe with New LHC Triggers
. The project brings together theory and experiment to develop predictions for dark-sector bound states and to perform a dedicated ATLAS…