Summer Students - 2017

We are offering up to eight places for Summer Students in 2017.

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 (Oxfordshire) 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 300 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

We require completed CVs, along with a Letter of Recommendation from your university tutor, by 21st February 2017.

• These should be sent separately by email to Jane.Bruffell@stfc.ac.uk.
• CVs should have "2017 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 "2017 PPD Summer Student Reference" as the subject of the email. We anticipate these will come directly from your tutor.

• 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 2017) - at the top
• Confirmation that you are eligible to live and work in UK (at the time of application) - 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 the following.

Feel free to tell us in which projects you would be particular interested (can be one or more). If you have no strong preference, that is fine. We will be looking for the best students and will try to match them up to suitable projects.

ATLAS

Physics impact of intense LHC beams

The ATLAS experiment at CERN's LHC collected data in 2016 at an unprecedented rate. The beam collided at 40MHz, and each time around 40 proton-proton collisions occurred, showering the detector with tens of billions of particles a second. The student will study the impact of these extra particles on the detector reconstruction. There are some indications that our models of the degradation are wrong ... can the truth be understood? Is the detector degraded in other ways we do not expect?

Proposed dates of project: Sometime in June-September.

Required skills: The projects will involve simple coding in C++ on Linux. An expertise with neither language nor operating system is necessary - but it would help. A readiness to try things out on a computer is essential. An interest in particle physics is a must!

What makes the Higgs boson?

The ATLAS and CMS Experiments discovered in 2012 a new particle, the Higgs boson. A lot has been learnt about it, but how is it actually made? They are created in the collision of two protons at LHC, but the proton is made of quarks, held together by gluons. Is it quarks colliding or gluons that creates the Higgs? Theory suggests gluons, but this has not been checked. This project will compare published data with predictions for the momentum of the Higgs boson in the two cases to try to uncover the truth.

Proposed dates of project: Sometime in June-September.

Required skills: The projects will involve simple coding in C++ on Linux. An expertise with neither language nor operating system is necessary - but it would help. A readiness to try things out on a computer is essential. An interest in particle physics is a must!

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. ATLAS has developed custom-built electronics (called the Fast TracKer, FTK) to find tracks before the start of the HLT; this hardware will be deployed and operated for the first time this year. In this project, you will use the ROOT analysis package to perform validation of the tracks from FTK and commission new FTK-based triggers ready to be used online later in the year.

Proposed dates of project: 8 weeks in the period June to August.

Required skills: 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.