Optical integration and optimisation for The Simons Observatory.

The Simons Observatory (SO) is the primary next-generation ground-based cosmological telescope, and is currently under construction in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Its prime scientific objectives are to characterize the origin, the content and the evolution of the Universe via observations of cosmic microwave background polarisation. The project has the potential to enable new fundamental physics discoveries which will advance the fields of particle physics and cosmology.
The Cardiff Astronomy instrumentation Group has a longstanding history of involvement in FIR and submillimetre instruments and is a world leader in developing quasi-optics and ultra-sensitive detectors operating at sub-Kelvin temperatures. For the SO, Cardiff will design, manufacture and characterise the optical and thermal filtering for the large-aperture and small-aperture receivers in order to control the thermal environment and the optical bandwidth of the instruments.
In addition, Cardiff University will lead the scientific exploitation of the data, which will benefit from assessing and mitigating systematic effects present in the optical chain.
Therefore there is a key link between the instrument design and the quality of the science output which Cardiff is in a key position to understand and enable. We seek a PhD student to understand the optical design of the SO receivers, to model and characterise the performance of optical and thermal filtering and to propagate the remaining systematic effects to the scientific analysis of the SO data.
The work will be jointly supervised between Prof Carole Tucker (instrumentation and characterisation) and Dr Erminia Calabrese (for science exploitation).