ICFO is offering a postdoctoral position to a well-qualified, highly motivated and dynamic young scientist who wishes to enhance his/her scientific career in a friendly and stimulating environment.

The successful candidate will be joining the Atomic Quantum Optics group led by Prof. Dr. Morgan Mitchell.

Searches for new particles and forces using table-top experiments is an expanding frontier of fundamental physics, which traditionally has relied upon powerful particle colliders, e.g. the LHC at CERN. Axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) are well-motivated dark matter candidates that could solve multiple open problems, including the strong-CP problem in nuclear physics, and anomalous galaxy rotation rates. If they exist, axions and ALPs would mediate a distinctive monopole-dipole force, detectable in principle with atomic magnetometer technologies. Spinor Bose-Einstein condensates (SBECs) are ideal candidates to search for such forces, as they are 1) extraordinarily coherent (coherence times of many seconds), 2) very compact, allowing a SBEC magnetometer to search for short-range monopole-dipole forces that are out of reach of other sensor technologies and 3) very clean, well-understood systems, essential for understanding systematic effects. The successful candidate for this position will join a small team of PhD and post-doctoral researchers working to develop SBECs as detectors of these hypothesized new forces.

“Financed by the European Union-NextGenerationEU-MICIIN (PRTR-C17. I1) and by the Generalitat de Catalunya"