APPLICATION DEADLINE: February 12, 2024.
Brief Description
"A better understanding of propagation through our Galaxy is the key to understanding new features of the cosmic-ray flux (such as the unexpected excess of anti-matter) discovered by space-based experiments. HELIX is a long-duration balloon experiment designed to measure cosmic-ray isotopes to improve our understanding of the propagation of these particles. To achieve its scientific goals, HELIX needs to precisely measure the trajectories and velocities of the particles. Three main particle detector systems are designed and constructed for HELIX. The overall system has more than 13,000 sensors to detect particle interactions and several hundreds of supporting sensors to monitor the health of those sensors. HELIX is an international collaboration with six US institutes, two Canadian institutes, and one Japanese institute.
HELIX collaboration is preparing for the first flight in 2024 summer from Kiruna, Sweden. The payload will be moved to Sweden in April 2024, aiming to launch sometime in May or June. The summer student will participate in remote monitoring of the payload, ensuring the healthy performance of the detector while it is waiting for the launch. As the experts in the detector system will provide the basic analysis scripts, the summer student's role is to execute those scripts for the transferred data and summarize the status. The summer student will work with the graduate students to improve the current analysis method and scripts. After the flight, the summer student will participate in the tabletop measurements to examine a list of ideas to improve the current HELIX system. The summer student will be required to work at the LEMMA laboratory located at Stirling Hall.”
Please contact: Nahee Park <nahee.park@queensu.ca>