Graduate Students / PhD

Our group is open in hiring graduate students. All applications must go through the physics department graduate program: we are not making final decisions in hiring! But feel free to contact us for information about our research activities and potential topics for a PhD. We are also open to students already engaged in a graduate program or who obtained a master degree outside US. Qualified candidate must have or soon obtain a bachelor degree in a physics major or equivalent. Due to the nature of our research activities, knowledge in particle physics, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, special relativity and interest in QCD and hadronic physics, and data analysis or simulations or hardware, are prefered.

Please contact mboer -at- vt.edu and/or the VT physics department graduate program manager for more information.

As mentionned in the main page, our group is specialized in studies of the nucleon structure. Our main goal is to understand the inner structure of the nucleon in term of quarks and gluons. Therefore, we study reactions where a high energy beam, provided by an accelerator, is sent off a target, and the distribution of the products in spectrometers tells us about the quark's distributions. We are particularly interested in "exclusive reactions" (where all products are known) in the Deep Inelastic regime (involving the exchange of a high virtuality photon, i.e. we access to the quarks). These reactions access Generalized Parton Distribution, functions containing information about the correlation between the quarks and gluons longitudinal momentum and their transverse spatial distribution. It leads to tomographic interpretations, i.e. "3D maps" of the inner structure of the nucleon.

Some of the topics we are currently working on are presented in the "undergrad projects" page. PhD students will have the opportunity to collaborate and participate in experiments at Jefferson Lab (JLab). Given that JLab is located within driving distance from the university, the students will be able to frequently travel on-site and/or stay for extended time to meet their colleagues and contribute to the running experiments, as well as in their preparation. Students will be expected to participate in the technical operation and will analyze data. Depending on their interests, they will also have the opportunity to perform phenomenological studies in order to interpret the results and/or participate in the development of future experiments. Prospective students can also apply for a short term intership (summer programs...) to define their interest in working in our group.