Founded in 1955, the Frascati National Laboratories (LNF) are the oldest and largest laboratories of INFN, the Italian agency devoted to fundamental research in nuclear and subnuclear physics. The LNF cover an area of 140000 m2 and are located about 20 km from the centre of Rome. They can be easily reached by car, by plane (two international airports), by bus and by train.
Research activities in the LNF are pursued in all major INFN areas of interest:
Particle Physics, Astroparticle Physics, Nuclear Physics, Theoretical
Physics and Detector Physics.
Several groups are participating in experimental programs in collaboration
with US institutions.
In particular the following groups have expressed their interest in the
2010 edition of the Summer Exchange Program and they invite US students to join their research activities: AMADEUS, BTF, NA62, MoonLIGHT-ILN , and OPERA. Candidates
must be enrolled as students at a US University and must have begun, at the time of application, at least the third year of a US University curriculum in physics, engineering or computing science. They can join
a team at the LNF for 10 weeks between June 1st
and September 30th, 2010. For further details refer to the Summer Exchange Program homepage. Opportunities
include participation in physics analysis activities of running experiments
as well as involvement in detector developments.
The
5 available positions at Frascati are the following:
1 position: AMADEUS Experiment
Title: Development of the trigger system for the AMADEUS experiment
Tutor: Dr. Catalina Curceanu (petrascu@lnf.infn.it)
AMADEUS is an experiment which has the goal to measure the kaon-nucleon/nuclei interaction at very low energies (on the DAFNE accelerator of LNF-INFN) in order to disentangle aspects of the QCD in the low-energy regime in the strangeness sector. The collaboration is presently developing a trigger prototype for the kaons, based on fibers read by Silicon PhotoMultipliers. The student will work on the construction and test of the prototype, as well as on data analyses. The final goal is to arrive to define the final trigger system to be implemented in the AMADEUS setup.
No preferred period. |
|
1 position: DAFNE BTF Facility
Title: Implementation of diagnostic device in the DAFNE Beam Test Facility
Tutor: Giovanni Mazzitelli (giovanni.mazzitelli@lnf.infn.it)
The DAFNE Beam Test Facility hosts tens of users per year, providing electron, positron and gamma beams for detector calibration purpose, testing and low energy electromagnetic interaction study. The facility provides to users many tools, form diagnostics detector to data acquisition system (DAQ) to record the information during the data taking. This DAQ is developed in labview and C and needs a continuous implementation to host the various diagnostic detectors, and provide in a easy way the information to the hosted experiment. The job will consists in developing the system, including new diagnostics device and photon tagging. The position is indicated for people in accelerator physics diagnostics and/or software engineer.
No preferred period. |
| |
1 position: MoonLIGHT-ILN Experiment
Title: Thermal and optical test and data analysis of the new payload of the MoonLIGHT- ILN experiment.
Tutor: Dr. Simone Dell'Agnello (simone.dellagnello@lnf.infn.it)
The goal of MoonLIGHT-ILN is the development and space characterization of 2nd generation laser retroreflectors for the precision orbit determination of the Moon through a time-of-flight measurement. This discipline, called Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR), started 40 years ago, when the Apollo and Lunokhod missions deployed retroreflectors on the surface of the Moon. LLR data are freely available and provide the best overall test of General Relativity with a single experiment (weak and strong equivalence principle, PPN parameter beta, geodetic precession, deviations from the inverse-square law, time variation of the gravitational constant G, extensions of General Relativity). MoonLIGHT-ILN stands for “Moon Laser Instrumentation for General relativity High-accuracy Tests for the International Lunar Network” (ILN). The experiment is an international collaboration between Italian and US institution. The latter include the University of Maryland at College Park, which was Principal Investigator of the 1st generation retroreflectors, and the University of California at San Diego, which leads the best LLR ground station, APOLLO (Apache Point Observatory LLr Operation; http://www.physics.ucsd.edu/~tmurphy/apollo/) located in the US. The ILN is formed by Space Agencies of nine countries, including NASA and ASI (see http://iln.arc.nasa.gov/). The student will participate in the thermal and optical test and data analysis of the new payload, funded by NASA and INFN, which is at LNF since 2008.
No preferred period. |
| |
1 position: NA62 Experiment
Title: NA62 detector development
Tutor: Dr. Tommaso Spadaro (tommaso.spadaro@lnf.infn.it)
The goal of the NA62 experiment at the CERN SPS is to collect on the order of 100 events of the extremely rare decay K+ --> pi+ nu anti-nu. Because of the clean theoretical prediction for the branching ratio for this decay, a precise measurement of its branching ratio may shed light on physics beyond the Standard Model. Such a measurement is extremely challenging, since the predicted branching ratio is 8 x 10^-11. Sensitive detectors are needed to identify photons from abundant decays such as K+--> pi+ pi0. A prototype, one of twelve detectors to be installed in the experiment at CERN, is currently being built at Frascati. The prototype is a cylinder, two meters in diameter, with 160 lead-glass crystal photodetectors arranged about the inside wall. The student will participate in the testing and commissioning of the detector elements and the front-end electronics. The completed prototype will ship to CERN at the end of the summer.
Preferred period: 1 June to 6 August (10 weeks). |
|
1 position: OPERA Experiment
Title: Data analysis with the electronic detectors of the OPERA experiment.
Tutor: Dr. Francesco Terranova (francesco.terranova@lnf.infn.it) and Alessandro Paoloni (alessandro.paoloni@lnf.infn.it)
The OPERA experiment has been designed to provide an unambiguous evidence for muon into tau neutrinos in the parameter region indicated by SuperKamiokande as the explanation of the zenith dependence of the atmospheric neutrino deficit. It is a long baseline experiment located at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory and exploiting the CNGS neutrino beam from CERN. The experiment is endowed with nuclear emulsion sheets interleaved with 1 mm thick lead plates for the neutrino interacion vertex reconstruction, with scintillator strips for the vertex location and with muon spectrometers for background rejection. Each muon spectrometer is made of one dipolar magnet with drift tubes and Resistive Plate Chambers inside the magnetized iron arms. The student will contribute to the analysis of the muon spectrometer data, in one of the following items:
1) Calibration of the RPC response as a hadronic calorimeter;
2) Estimation of the muon trigger efficiency on CNGS as well as on cosmic events.
No preferred period.
|
| |
To apply, please
fill the application
form available on the Summer Exchange Program homepage.
LOCAL
EXCHANGE PROGRAM CONTACTS:
Administration and Logistic:
Luisa Bontempi (Administration Office)
Patrizia Fioretti (Personnel Office)
Stefania Pelliccioni (Visitor's Office)
Scientific coordination:
Catalina Curceanu Petrascu (coordinator)
M. Cristina D'Amato (secretary)
Phone
+39-06-94032373
author: mcd
|
