Summer Students - 2016

We are offering up to eight places for Summer Students in 2016.

We are looking for high-quality undergraduates who are currently in their 3^rd year studying physics.

Successful applicants will work with our staff at RAL on one of our projects . These include ATLAS, CMS, Dark Matter, LHCb and T2K.

Studentships will be for typically 8 weeks, in the period June to September.

Students will be responsible for their own accommodation and transport, but will be paid of the order of 320 pounds per week to cover their expenses.

Eligibility

Applicants should be in their 3^rd year, studying physics. They must be eligible to work in the UK.

How to Apply

• These should be sent separately by email to Jane.Bruffell@stfc.ac.uk.
• CVs should have "2016 PPD Summer Student Application" as the subject of the email. Do not include additional information in your email, but put it in your CV.
• Letters of Recommendation should have "2016 PPD Summer Student Reference" as the subject of the email.

• Name
• Home address
• Correspondence address if different
• Email address
• Contact phone number (s)
• Information about your current study:
  • University
  • Course name
  • Year of study (should be 3^rd year!)
  • Subjects studied
  • Results to date
• Past academic record
  • Schools
  • Dates
  • Subjects studied and results
• Past work experience
• Computing experience
• Interests and hobbies, etc

• Preferred period of Studentship (in June-September 2015) - at the top

• A statement as to why you are interested in a Studentship

We hope to come to conclusions by first week of March.

There is a certain amount of flexibility in start/end dates and we will try to match selected students to suitable projects.

If you have questions about the process or the programme, contact Stephen.Haywood@stfc.ac.uk

Projects

Possible projects include:

LHCb

Search for lepton flavour violating decays at LHCb

Searching for lepton-flavour violating decays is a powerful way to search for physics beyond the Standard Model. These searches can be performed with unprecedented sensitivity in a variety of b-hadron decays at LHCb, one of the four main experiments on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The project involves data-analysis of real data and of simulated events in the LHCb detector. The objectives include: the selection of suitable samples of B-meson decays, the estimation of the background, the comparison of data and simulation, the evaluation of the experimental sensitivity.

The student will understand how to undertake a physics analysis and will be exposed to a wide range of computing techniques. He will work in a small team of physicists and will be asked to present the status of his work in regular meetings. This is a challenging project for an 8 weeks placement; however, each objective is in itself a self-contained piece of work, so the student may choose to focus only on a part of the project, depending on his/her own abilities and skills.

Proposed dates of placement: 4 July to 26 August (negotiable)

Student specification: Enthusiastic about particle physics and computing. Basic knowledge of particle physics and good computing skills are required. Knowledge of Root and C++ would be an advantage.

CMS

CMS Trigger Upgrade

From 2025, the Large Hadron Collider will be colliding protons at such a high rate that the CMS detector must be upgraded to cope. In particular, the “level 1 trigger”, whose purpose is to identify interesting collisions within a few microseconds of them taking place, must be significantly improved. We wish to reconstruct, on this very short time-scale, the trajectories of the numerous charged particles produced in each LHC collision. We will do this using high-speed programmable electronics (FPGAs). This is a very challenging project, and research is underway here to optimise our proposed solution.

One or two summer student will use C++ software running on simulated LHC collision events to develop the algorithms used to reconstruct the particle trajectories. Since these algorithms must ultimately be run in the electronics, the student will need to keep them as simple as possible, and understand the limitations and strengths of the electronics.

Proposed dates of placement: 8 weeks during a period to be agreed from June to August.

Student specification: You need a logical mind and should be familiar with computer programming, and ideally with C++. An interest in particle physics or electronics would be a bonus.

ATLAS

HLT Tracking Triggers

The ATLAS Trigger system makes fast, real-time, decisions on whether to keep data from interesting proton-proton collision events to be studied later, or discard them. We can only keep about 1 in 100,000 collisions. The High Level Trigger (HLT) includes fast software algorithms that process information from the Inner Detector to find charged particle tracks. Because of the huge number of particles produced in LHC collisions, the Inner Detector tracking software uses a lot of computing power - almost half of the HLT computing resources are used to reconstruct tracks in real time. We are investigating the use of Graphical Process Units (GPU) to speed up the HLT tracking code. You will help with the implementation and optimisation of the HLT tracking software on a GPU using the CUDA programming language. As an upgrade to be commissioned later this year, ATLAS has developed custom-built electronics (called the Fast TracKer, FTK) to find tracks before the start of the HLT. In the second part of the project, you will use the ROOT analysis package to validate new FTK-based triggers that will be put online later this year.

Proposed dates of placement: within 6/6 - 9/9

Student specification: You should have an interest in computing with some experience of programming in C++ or a similar language. Some knowledge of ROOT would be helpful but is not essential.

ATLAS Tracking Studies

In ATLAS, preparations are on-going to upgrade the detectors for data-taking around 2025 when the Large Hadron collider will collide protons with a much higher rate than today. Presently in data-taking, around 20 other mostly low-energetic collisions overlap the interesting physics interactions. In 2025, the situation will be even worse and up to 400 additional interactions will happen simultaneously. This will be a challenge for the detectors and the physics analyses. For this upgrade, a new tracking detector will be build in which a group here at RAL is significantly involved.

The summer student will help with the preparations of the design for this new detector. He/she will study the tracking performance for different detector options which are being investigated and thus, can have an impact on the final detector design. To do so, he/she will use simulations to study for example the precision of reconstructing the proton-proton interaction vertex or the momentum for different particle types. For this tasks he/she will use C++ code to analyse the output of the ATLAS reconstruction software suite.

Proposed dates of placement: 8 weeks in the period between June to end of August

Student specification: You should have an interest in computing but no deep prior knowledge in C++ is required.

ATLAS Rift - Virtual reality tours of the ATLAS detector

The ATLAS Rift project [ http://atlasrift.web.cern.ch/] aims to bring virtual reality tours of the ATLAS detector to the public. Demonstrations will be available at major physics conferences in 2016 and an EU grant has been submit to fund the purchase of headsets at major museums around Europe. The software has been designed for the Oculus Rift Virtual reality headset and has been in development for well over a year. The headset however only became available for pre-order in January 2016. The aim of the project will be to setup and test the virtual reality tour at RAL. This can then be used as a template for other demonstrations. Posters and other media will need to be created. There will also be opportunity for some development work on the software.

This project depends on the availability of the virtual reality headsets. If the hardware is not available, then an alternative projects are listed below.

Student specification: Enthusiastic about particle physics and computing. This is an outreach project so good communication/presentation skills are essential. Knowledge of the Unreal Engine would be useful.

Proposed start and end dates of placement: within 6/6 - 9/9

ATLAS Tracker Construction

The ATLAS detector is made of layers of different types of sensors. The inner most layers are pixels and silicon strips. During summer of 2016, the strip detector team at RAL will be assembling and testing prototypes of strip sensor assemblies. We are looking for 1 or 2 students to assist with prototype evaluation. This position is primarily hands-on testing in a cleanroom laboratory environment. Testing involves using instruments to measure physical and electrical properties, processing and presenting the data collected. There may be some work involving evaluation of both pixel and strip data acquisition systems.

Student specification: Patience and carefulness to handle delicate and expensive hardware. It is desirable (but not essential) if students have some familiarity with C++, Python, Matlab, experience with electrical test equipment and experience of data processing or data analysis in Excel, Python, Matlab or Root.

Lux-Zeplin (LZ)

Calibration Studies for the LZ Experiment

The nature of dark matter is one of the open and fundamental questions in physics, and the LZ experiment is at the forefront of technology designed to pursue this question. The experiment will instrument 7 tonnes of liquid xenon, with the ability to measure particle interactions of <2 keV, in a detector with extremely low rates of radioactive backgrounds. The success of the LZ experiment depends on a careful understanding of the response of the detector, which requires a careful programme of calibration.

The summer student will use simulation to study the calibration needs for such an ambitious detector, including determining how often the detector must be calibrated, the optimal mix of calibration sources, and the impact of calibrations on dark matter searches.

Student specification: You should have an interest in particle physics and computing, with some experience of programming in C++ or a similar language. Some knowledge of ROOT would be helpful but is not essential.

Non-experiment Specific Projects

Long-range RFID asset management system.

Alternative ATLAS Computing Projects

Running ATLAS software on HPC.

The Hartree centre is home to the Blue Joule and Blue Wonder supercomputing platforms. Blue Joule is currently ranked 49 in the top 500 supercomputers. Supercomputers are designed to run a small number of massively parallel jobs. This frequently leaves unused CPU capacity scattered throughout the platform. Computing for the LHC is at the other end of the spectrum. Each event can be treated separately and therefore they can be easily processed by a single CPU core in a short amount of time. The problem the LHC has is that it has to simulate and analyse many billions of events. ATLAS aims to be able to make use of any spare capacity offered to run jobs. The aim of this project is to run the ATLAS event generation and simulation software on the supercomputing platforms available to make use of these opportunistic resources.

Student specification: Enthusiastic about particle physics and computing. Knowledge of unix operating systems/computer architecture would be extremely useful. Knowledge of C++, python, shell scripting useful.

Proposed dates of placement: within 6/6 - 9/9

ATLAS data analytics