Postdoctoral Fellow; PREP

Salary

$80,000 - $89,000

Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876, is America's first research university and home to nine world-class academic divisions working together as one university.

This position is part of the National Institute of Standards (NIST)
Professional Research Experience (PREP) program. NIST recognizes that its research staff may wish to collaborate with researchers at academic institutions on specific projects of mutual interest, thus requires that such institutions must be the recipient of a PREPaward. The PREP program requires staff from a wide range of backgrounds to work on scientific research in many areas. Employee sin this position will perform technical work that underpins the scientific research of the collaboration.

Postdoctoral researcher / Precision measurement ofthermophysical quantities

NIST seeks a postdoctoral researcher with an interest in the precision measurement of thermophysical quantities. Examplequantities of interest include thermodynamic temperature, pressure,refractive index, thermal expansion, density virial coefficients,magnetic susceptibility. A unifying principle of the work is thatall measurements are based on precision opticalinterferometry.

For example, one branch of interest is to develop a cryogenic gasthermometer. The working principle is refractive index gasthermometry, using a Fabry-Perot cavity resonator filled withhelium gas; temperature is derived from the ideal gas law. Thesystem targets a temperature range of 4 K to 303 K, with currentart performance realizing the SI unit kelvin.

Another branch of interest is the development of an accurate,air-based dilatometer to measure the thermal expansion coefficientof materials important to dimensional metrology. The workingprinciple is displacement interferometry with a linear slidetranslation stage. The system targets accuracy of about 3×10−8 /Kon the thermal expansion coefficient in the temperature range 283 Kto 313 K.

A third branch of interest is to measure the magneticsusceptibility of gases important to thermodynamic metrology. The working principle is a “Faraday balance”, which consists ofbalancing a suspended dumbbell in a magnetic field; as the volumearound the dumbbell is filled with the test (diamagnetic) gas, thedumbbell will rotate, and the magnetic susceptibility isproportional to the rotation. The undertaking aims to resolve largedisagreements between historic measurement and recent ab initiocalculation of the magnetic susceptibility of helium, neon, argon,and nitrogen.

• Conduct research and development into precision interferometry,and its application to the measurement of thermophysicalquantities
• Instrumentation of apparatus, including optical, electrical,mechanical, and control automation
• Instrument control, data acquisition and curation, and finalanalysis all performed in python
• Publishing results of research to relevant journals and presentation at conferences

U.S. Citizen Preferred

• PhD in Physics, Chemistry, or Chemical or Electrical Engineering
• Experience with optics, laser control and feedback electronics,and temperature and pressure measurements
• Experience with frequency metrology (optical and rf)
• Familiarity with measurement uncertainty and error analysis
• Ability to work with the python programming language.

Authority: 15 U.S.C. § 278g-1(e)(1) and (e)(3) and 15 U.S.C. § 272(b) and (c)

Purpose:

The National Institute for Standards and Technology(NIST) hosts the Professional Research Experience Program (PREP), which is designed to provide valuable…