4 PhD and 1 postdoc position in low-energy precision measurements

With a recently awarded FOM program grant, we are starting an exciting new project to measure the electric dipole moment (EDM) of the electron. This property, which is predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics to be extremely small, is a powerful probe to explore physics beyond this Standard Model. All extensions to the Standard Model, most prominently supersymmetry, naturally predict an electron EDM that is just below the current experimental limits. We aim to improve on the best current measurement by at least an order of magnitude. To do so we will perform a precision measurement on a slow beam of laser-cooled BaF molecules. With this low-energy precision experiment, we test physics at energies comparable to those of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)!

The eEDM program research staff consists of Anastasia Borschevsky, Klaus Jungmann, Steven Hoekstra, Rob Timmermans and Lorenz Willmann from the Van Swinderen Institute for Particle Physics and Gravity (VSI) at the University of Groningen, and Rick Bethlem and Wim Ubachs from the Atoms, molecules and lasers group at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam. The experiment will be operated at the VSI in Groningen. To start this team effort we currently invite applications for the first round of PhD and postdoc positions.

Details of the positions, and instructions on how to apply, can be found here. The deadline for the application for these positions is 15 January 2017.