Post-doctoral position in X-ray astronomy

    The astrophysics department at Saclay, which is situated 30 km south of Paris, is a major space astrophysics laboratory and is also involved in ground-based instrumentation.
Our institute played a major role in the hardware development and calibration of the EPIC MOS cameras on XMM Newton and participates in the SSC consortium that is responsible for the catalogue of XMM-Newton sources.
At high energies, the institute provides important contributions to Integral, Fermi, SVOM and the future Athena mission, as well as the HESS and CTA TeV instruments.
Other major projects are JWST/MIRI, Euclid, ELT/METIS, ARIEL.

    We invite applications for a position in which the candidate is expected to work half-time on our activities in the XMM SSC consortium, and half-time on science related to our research interests.

    Our activities in the XMM SSC consortium include the EPIC MOS data analysis software, the EPIC MOS in-flight calibration, background studies, screening the products generated by the data processing pipeline and testing the catalogue products.

    Our research interests are primarily in three domains:
- supernova remnants (F. Acero, A. Decourchelle, J. Ballet), where our interests lie primarily around detailed spatially-resolved studies and modelling of nearby SNRs;
- multi wavelength observations of clusters of galaxies (G.W. Pratt);
- mining the XMM catalogue (J. Ballet).

The position is funded by the French space agency CNES.
The starting date is January 2025, but applications to start a few months later will be considered.

The selection and interviews will happen in September.

Requirements: PhD, background in observational astrophysics or signal processing
Competences: data analysis and statistics, physics of hot gas in the Universe
 

AIM/Departement d'Astrophysique, CEA Saclay, 91191 Gif sur Yvette Cedex, France
Lab's web site: https://irfu.cea.fr/dap/en/
SSC web site: http://xmmssc.irap.omp.eu/