Boulby Mine Postdoctoral Research Associate - Edinburgh, United Kingdom - University of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh

Verified Company

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

2 weeks ago

Posted by:

Tom O´Connor

beBee Recruiter

Description

Boulby Mine Postdoctoral Research Associate

UE07 £35,333 - £42,155 per annum

Science & Engineering / Physics & Astronomy / Particle and Nuclear Physics

Fixed Term Three years

The Opportunity:

The University of Edinburgh aims to strengthen its strategic partnership with the STFC Boulby Underground Laboratory.

Boulby is the UK's deep underground science facility located 1.1km below ground, within a working potash, polyhalite and salt mine.

It is a special place for science, enabling a wide range of studies requiring access to the geologically interesting and ultra-low background environment.

This appointment will further strengthen the Boulby Underground Laboratory as the UK's centre of excellence in all areas of ultra-sensitive radioassay.

The laboratory presently hosts an array of world class high purity germanium detectors and two XIA UltraLo surface alpha counters.

You will contribute strongly to the management, operation, and analysis of data from these devices.

In collaboration with University College London and King's College London, we are in the process of installing an inductively-coupled mass spectrometer to the mine's surface laboratory.

You will participate in its installation and commissioning and become its lead operator.

You will lead analysis of samples assayed with all three types of device to deliver complete characterisation of their radioactivity content.

A particular focus is radon, which may be a limiting background in future extreme rare event physics experiments. You will conduct research into optimal methods for the reduction and mitigation of radon for such experiments.

The post may be located in either Edinburgh or near Boulby, with substantial travel to either Boulby or Edinburgh then required as appropriate.

Your skills and attributes for success:

Possess, or be about to obtain a PhD in experimental nuclear or particle physics
Proven track record of performing high quality research in experimental physics
Demonstrated competence in the use of fragile, sensitive and potentially hazardous apparatus
Ability to selfmotivate and work independently
Ability to work as part of a team while showing leadership and initiative

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As a valued member of our team you can expect:
An exciting, positive, creative, challenging and rewarding place to work. We give you support, nurture your talent and reward success.

You will benefit from a competitive reward package and a wide range of staff benefits, which includes a generous holiday entitlement, a defined benefits
pension scheme ,
staff discounts, family friendly initiatives
, flexible working and much more.

Access our staff benefits page
for further information and use our reward calculator **to find out the total value of pay and benefits provided.

The University of Edinburgh holds a Silver Athena SWAN award in recognition of our commitment to advance gender equality in higher education.

We are members of the Race Equality Charter and we are also Stonewall Scotland Diversity Champions, actively promoting LGBT equality.

If invited for interview you will be required to evidence your right to work in the UK. Further information is available on our
right to work webpages

As a world-leading research-intensive University, we are here to address tomorrow's greatest challenges.

Between now and 2030 we will do that with a values-led approach to teaching, research and innovation, and through the strength of our relationships, both locally and globally.

The Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics is composed of three research groups.

The Particle Physics Experiments group seeks understanding of the fundamental particles of nature and the interactions governing their behaviour.

In particular, we aim to explain the dominance of matter over anti-matter through the study of CP violation with the LHCb experiment: to understand the mechanisms of electroweak symmetry breaking that lead to the creation of mass, and to search for new particles at ATLAS and future colliders; to discover and characterise particle dark matter with the LUX-ZEPLIN and DarkSide-20k experiments; and to explore neutrino oscillations, and neutrinos of astrophysical origin with experiments distributed grid computing (GridPP), to store and analyse the vast quantities of data that are produced in these endeavours.

The Nuclear Physics Group has a broad and diverse range of research interests aimed at understanding the properties and structure of nuclei, the origin of the chemical elements in the universe, and the way in which nuclear reactions power some of the most spectacular stellar explosions, such as novae, supernovaea and X-ray bursts.

Our research is performed at world-leading oversea laboratories (TRIUMF, RIKEN, GSI, LUNA, CERN and others), using a variety of experimental techniques and state-of-the-art instrumentation developed by