Graduate Position, University of Toronto – MATHUSLA

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This position is open to those with or finishing an undergraduate degree in physics, or related equivalent who have a strong interest in particle detector development. This opportunity is intended for a 1 year Master’s of Science (MSc).Domestic and International candidates are welcome to apply.

The successful candidate will work on the MAssive Timing Hodoscope for Ultra-Stable neutraL pArticles (MATHUSLA), under the supervision of Prof. Miriam Diamond at the University of Toronto. On-campus and remote work will be a major component of this position, and the project includes working with simulations as well as hardware development.

The potential project would include:

• Hands-on research and development in Miriam’s basement lab: evaluating the performance of various key hardware components, testing various electronic readout circuits, and operating basic data acquisition systems
• Remote work: computer simulations and event reconstruction software to help inform the detector design

Interested candidates are encouraged to contact Miriam before applying. You can find how to apply to the University of Toronto for graduate positions here. Please note that the deadline to apply is December 15, and applications are encouraged to be submitted as early as possible for full consideration.

More about the project:

MATHUSLA is a proposed new large-scale surface detector located above CMS at CERN. It would be composed of several 100m x 100m layers of plastic scintillator blocks, with wavelength-shifting optical fibers read out by silicon photomultipliers. 

Existing LHC searches for Beyond the Standard Model (SM) physics are largely insensitive to neutral Long-Lived Particles (LLPs), which are invisible until they decay into visible SM particles some macroscopic distance from the interaction point. Far from being exotic oddities, LLP signatures are fundamentally motivated in various BSM models, including dark sector scenarios. Although dedicated searches for these signatures are ramping up at ATLAS and CMS, trigger and background limitations severely curtail the range of LLP masses, decay modes and lifetimes to which they are sensitive. Particularly challenging are LLPs with very long lifetimes that decay dominantly outside of the detector. The LHC could be producing many LLPs with MeV–TeV masses that cannot be produced anywhere else, but that existing detectors cannot discover. MATHUSLA could detect LLPs with lifetimes near the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis limit of 0.1 s, and would extend the sensitivity of the main detectors by orders of magnitude for large classes of highly motivated LLP signatures. As a secondary physics objective, MATHUSLA would also be able to perform cutting-edge cosmic ray physics observations to elucidate the nature of galactic cosmic rays, supernovae and other astrophysical sources.

More about the position:

Joining Miriam’s research group ensures attendance at (minimum) one local conference plus one international conference per year, and attendance at (minimum) one summer school or workshop series (e.g. TRISEP ).