We are looking for an enthusiastic PhD student to work on the XENONnT direct Dark Matter detection experiment.

The experiment uses scintillation and ionization signals from a liquid xenon target to look for Dark Matter interactions and is expected to become one of the world’s most sensitive Dark Matter detectors. The construction of the XENONnT detector is completed and its commissioning is ongoing. The experiment is located in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy and run by an international team of scientists. The Amsterdam group is closely involved in all aspects of XENONnT and will take an important role in the upcoming operations and data-analysis.

What are you going to do?

The successful candidate will focus on the analysis of low-energy data from the XENONnT experiment. This topic has received much interest recently due to a yet unexplained excess of events observed by the XENON1T experiment. This may point towards a not well understood backgrounds, or maybe even new physics.

The project is a close collaboration between the Experimental Dark matter group and the Nikhef theory department, where a theory PhD student will be hired.

What do we require?

The successful candidate should:

• have a Master’s degree in Physics or equivalent (expected to be received by fall 2021);
• excel academically, as indicated by grade transcript and curriculum vitae;
• fluent in spoken and written English;
• have the ability and interest to work in a collaborative team;
• have an interest in sharing science with the wider non-scientist community.

Strong software skills are highly desirable.

Our offer

A temporary contract for 38 hours per week for the duration of 4 years (the initial contract will be for a period of 18 months and after satisfactory evaluation it will be extended for a total duration of 4 years) and should lead to a dissertation (PhD thesis). We will draft an educational plan that includes attendance of courses and (international) meetings. We also expect you to assist in teaching undergraduates and master students.

The salary, depending on relevant experience before the beginning of the employment contract, will be €2,395 to €3,061 (scale P) gross per month, based on a full-time contract (38 hours a week), exclusive 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% end-of-year bonus. A favourable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities is applicable.

Are you curious about our extensive package of secondary employment benefits like our excellent opportunities for study and development? Then find out more about working at the Faculty of Science.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.

Faculty of Science and the Nikhef Institute

The Faculty of Science has a student body of around 7,000, as well as 1,600 members of staff working in education, research or support services. Researchers and students at the Faculty of Science are fascinated by every aspect of how the world works, be it elementary particles, the birth of the universe or the functioning of the brain.

The University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Dark Matter group is embedded at Nikhef, the national institute for subatomic physics in the Netherlands. At Nikhef, approximately 175 physicists and 75 technical staff members work together in an open and international scientific environment at Nikhef. Jointly, they perform excellent theoretical and experimental research in the fields of Particle- and astroparticle physics. Among the research collaborations Nikhef participates in are the ATLAS, LHCb and ALICE experiments at CERN, the KM3NeT neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean, the Virgo interferometer in Pisa, the XENON Dark matter detector in Gran Sasso, Italy and the Pierre Auger cosmic ray observatory in Argentina. Nikhef is a collaboration between six major Dutch universities and the Nikhef research institute. The Dark Matter Group is also part of GRAPPA, a collaboration between UvA’s Institute of Physics and the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy.