About this role
PhD candidate in cosmic-ray physics with the KM3NeT neutrino telescope Join us Nikhef is the national institute for subatomic physics in the Netherlands. At Nikhef, approximately 250 physicists and 80 technical staff work together in an open and international scientific environment. Together they perform theoretical and experimental research in particle and astroparticle physics. KM3NeT is a next-generation neutrino telescope taking shape on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. Its primary scientific goals are to discover and study high-energy astrophysical neutrinos and their sources with the ARCA detector, and to investigate neutrino oscillations-including the determination of the neutrino mass ordering-with the ORCA detector. Both detectors also record enormous numbers of atmospheric muons from cosmic-ray air showers, and these muons carry information about particle interactions at energies far beyond the reach of any accelerator on Earth. In this project you will turn that signal into cosmic-ray physics: measuring the muon content of air showers, confronting high-energy hadronic-interaction models and helping to solve the long-standing "muon puzzle". You will carry out your research in the KM3NeT group at Nikhef, which initiated and coordinates the cosmic-ray activities within the international KM3NeT Collaboration, and you will work in a friendly, supportive and international team. This is what you will do As a PhD candidate you will develop new ways to extract cosmic-ray physics from KM3NeT data. You will design and characterise reconstruction methods-both machine-learning-based and traditional-for the bundles of muons that reach the detectors, and apply them to data and simulations to constrain cosmic-ray composition and hadronic-interaction models. We support you with a rich international collaboration, extensive computing resources and close day-to-day supervision within the group. Your tasks and responsibilities includ...