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High Energy Physics

20 May 2025

UCL High Energy Physics

Summer Student Opportunities

Brian Duff Summer Internship

The HEP group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy are offering two studentships to undergraduates interested in pursuing research projects over the summer. The key aims of the studentships are to give motivated undergraduates the opportunity to work on a research project, gain experience developing and writing a research proposal and presenting their research to their peers.

The exact timetable and location of the research project (on campus at UCL, or remote) will be agreed between you and your supervisor following a successful application.

The deadline for receiving applications is 17:00 on Monday 28th April 2025. General enquiries should be directed to the Group Administrator

Details

  • Applicants should be undergraduates in the department of Physics and Astronomy or UCL Natural Sciences undergraduates with a physics major stream. The internships are for students in Year 2 (BSc or MSci) and Year 3 (MSci registered).
  • The main supervisor of the project will be a current academic in the department of Physics and Astronomy.
  • Students will be provided a bursary of £2000 during the studentship and are expected to work on the summer project for a total duration of 8–10 weeks.

Application Instructions

  • Consult the list of projects below.
  • Prepare a cover letter, indicating your project preference and describing how your skills and physics interests are matched to the project. This should be 1 side of A4.
  • Prepare an up-to-date CV including details of your academic performance so far. This should be a maximum of 2 sides of A4.
  • Please emaild both documents as PDF files to the HEP group administrator by the deadline specified above.
  • Successful applicants will be notified in May.

Summer Projects Available

  • [P1] Probing New Physics Models at the LHC [Prof. Jon Butterworth] The LHC is producing a library of energy-frontier measurements which test how well the Standard Model (SM) works above the electroweak-symmetry-breaking energy scale, and also have implications for physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). This project will use the Contur toolkit to compare data to SM and BSM predictions to push the limits of our knowledge at the energy frontier. See this web page for more information about Contur. The details and specific as to what models we would study will be discussed nearer the time. Contur is a python package running via the Linux/Unix shell.
  • [P2] Paleo-Neutrino Detection [Prof. David Waters] Do certain geological samples contain an imprint of neutrino interactions, including those from supernova explosions, that have occurred over millions of years? The field of paleo-neutrino detection sets out to answer this question. At UCL, joint work between Physics & Astronomy and Earth Sciences has involved looking at modern scanning methods to look for tiny defects in mineral samples that could indicate neutrino interations or, more likely, radioative decays that can mimic those interactions. However the neutrino physicist's background is the geophysicist's signal, and those radioative decays can themselves be used for accurate mineral dating. We have recently acquired data from a Selective Plane Illumination Microscope (SPIM) instrument viewing a mica sample at UCL. The core part of this summer project is to analyse the images from this instrument and find ways of counting the interaction sites, and then testing various hypotheses such as whether the sites are uniformly distributed. We will also seek to obtain new images using the same instrument with different samples. You will have the opportunity to explore and develop new image processing algorithms, perhaps involving machine-learning approaches, to analyse these SPIM images and draw conclusions regarding this new geophyical scanning technique. You may also have the opportunity to work alongside other students and experts in the Department of Earth Sciences.

Summer Student Programmes at National Labs

The two major European Laboratories for Particle Physics, CERN and DESY, and the leading US particle physics laboratory, FNAL, offer very attractive Summer Student programmes for 3rd or 4th year undergraduate students of Physics or related subjects (such as Computing, Elec. Engineering etc). These are unique opportunities to get a first hand experience of how research is conducted at an international scale.

  • The deadline for applications to the CERN summer school is generally at the end of January and further details are available from the CERN website.
  • The deadline for applications to the DESY is at the end of January and further details are available from the DESY summer students page.
  • The deadline for the application to the FNAL programmes is February. Further details on Fermilab internships are here .
  • The particle physics group at RAL also runs a summer student programme, details can be found here : the deadline for applications is usually in February.

Faculty Scholarship Schemes

The MAPS faculty offers opportunities and funding for students to work with a research group over the summer. Further information can be found on Moodle: MAPS Summer Research Internships. The student application deadline likely to be in March.