Research Traineeships

We support a total of four traineeships with a duration of two years each. The trainees will join the California EIC consortium and focus on R&D for the EIC. During the academic year, the trainees will join research groups at UCLA or UCR; during the summer, they will intern for 10 weeks at either LBNL or LLNL.

The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is a flagship nuclear physics facility and the only planned high energy collider in the U.S., to be built at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The trainees will help design future EIC detectors based on state-of-the-art technologies, such as silicon pixel sensors and novel compact calorimeters. Detector design requires theory input to gauge requirements, so the trainees will also get engaged in simulating physics processes of interest in the joint theory and experiment setup.

We offer the trainees access to the superb technical infrastructure of LBNL and LLNL. For example, we expect the trainees to participate in quantifying the performance of prototype detectors using beams at the LBNL 88'' cyclotron. The trainees will set up the experimental equipment, participate in data-taking, and analyze the data. Access to unique facilities and live, unique experiments can expand education in transformative ways. It is relatively rare for undergrads to have access to accelerators, yet such experience has proven invaluable inspiration to pursue STEM degrees. Trainees will also analyze Petabyte-scale datasets with HPC systems at Livermore and LBNL. They will perform detailed simulations of the performance of the silicon tracker and calorimeters designs. This work will produce very large data sets and give students experience with modern data science techniques, including machine learning.

In summary, the trainees will join a network of undergraduate and graduate students, and postdocs in one or more of the following activities:

• Simulate performance of silicon-tracker and calorimeter designs.
• Gauge feasibility of new observables.
• Characterize prototype detectors on the bench.
• Quantify performance using beams at LBNL’s 88'' cyclotron.

We envision that each trainee will work pairwise with another undergraduate in the California EIC consortium to foster peer-to-peer learning and community building. We also plan that the trainees will be mentored by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, all of whom will be devoting a large portion of their time to EIC R&D.

The trainees will participate in weekly meetings with groups at UC campuses, as well as the regular meetings of the California EIC consortium. The trainees will gather one-on-one with UCR and UCLA mentors on a weekly basis and regularly with their UC peers in informal settings.

We will support students to present their results in undergraduate conferences. We also expect our students to participate in meetings of the American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics, under the Conference Experience for Undergraduates Program, and the yearly California EIC consortium meeting.

Over the two years of the traineeship, the students will gain a variety of both soft and hard skills, including but not limited to:

• Ability to work effectively in large research projects, which involve several institutions.
• Communication of results of research activities to expert and general audiences.
• Software skills to run large-scale simulations in high-performance computing clusters.
• Technical skills for experimental setup and theoretical simulations in accelerator settings, electronics troubleshooting, etc.
• Modern data-science tools, including machine learning techniques.