Queen’s Experimental Astroparticle Physics Group, Accelerated Master’s Opportunities for 3rd Year Undergrads

APPLICATION DEADLINE: Wednesday, February 7th, 2024

The Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy offers a combined program of a BScH/MSc (Physics). This program offers an opportunity for undergraduate students to carry out summer research between their 3rd and 4th years, then, in the 4th year of their Honours program (Physics) to take up to 2 courses in Physics at the graduate level which would then allow these students to enter the graduate program with advanced standing. Research begun as an undergraduate could be carried forward as a foundation for the graduate thesis, which would create an opportunity for exceptional students to complete the graduate degree within 4 terms.

Please send a cover letter, a cv, and a copy of a recent transcript by e-mail to the contact for each of the experiments you are interested in. Successful candidates will have strong academic records in Physics, Engineering Physics, Chemistry, or a related discipline and will have some relevant experience demonstrating potential for research. Students eligible for NSERC, USRA or other fellowship support are strongly encouraged to apply.

KDK+ is a new experiment measuring a rare decay of 40K with openings for accelerated masters students to work on hardware, simulations and analysis.
Contact: Philippe Di Stefano (distefan@queensu.ca, and https://www.queensu.ca/academia/di-stefano/)

DEAP and DarkSide are large-scale liquid argon experiments that use the unique properties of liquid argon scintillation to search for extremely rare dark matter interactions. DEAP is based at SNOLAB and has already acquired 3 years’ worth of data. DarkSide is a next-generation experiment, and will be the first direct dark matter experiment to fully instrument the detector with novel quantum sensors called Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs). Opportunities available to students include analysis of DEAP data as well as assistance with data-taking, and simulating and testing the data acquisition system for DarkSide in conjunction with colleagues at TRIUMF. There is also the opportunity for students to gain hands-on experience, using a small cryostat facility in our lab at Queen’s to measure various properties of different detector materials used by DEAP and DarkSide.
Contact: Fred Schuckman (fgs@queensu.ca)