Nikhef is the national institute for subatomic physics in the Netherlands with ca. 250 employees of which about 120 are physicists. It is a collaboration of four universities and the funding agency FOM. The institute coordinates and supports major activities in experimental subatomic physics in the Netherlands such as the preparation of experiments at the LHC at CERN, notably ATLAS, LHCb and ALICE. The scientific programme also includes several astroparticle physics projects, in particular participation in the ANTARES neutrino telescope, the AUGER cosmic-ray observatory and the VIRGO gravitational-wave interferometer.

Within the theory group Nikhef pursues the project 'Precision phenomenology at the LHC'. The symbolic manipulation system 'FORM' is a key component in this project. The FORM package is heavily used for very demanding calculations in theoretical particle physics. The FORM program consists of about 100K lines of C code and has been developed over the past decades at Nikhef. The LHC project at the Nikhef theory group combines FORM with the Japanese program GRACE. This program constructs automatically programs for whole categories of predictions in particle physics. The resulting Fortran programs tend to be lengthy, the goal is to make these shorter by automatic techniques. Upon successful completion of this project, the results will also be useful for many other fields of research.

For this project we are searching for a

Scientific Programmer for LHC predictions

This job position is offered for a period of 18 month.

The successful candidate will be working on the following items of the FORM software:

• Optimization of C and Fortran code produced by FORM. Some original development will have to take place inside the group, which may result in a scientific publication.
• Improvement the internal structure of FORM with the eventual goal of making FORM an open source project.
• Documentation about the internals of the FORM software.
• Develop programming interfaces for linking FORM with external libraries, e.g. for the calculation of the Gröber bases.

We offer a challenging environment in a scientific institute. The successful candidate will be positioned in the computer technology group at Nikhef and become a member of the project team.

Requirements

Given the nature of the position, we expect the candidate to have a good knowledge of the programming language C and some knowledge of Fortran, as well as some familiarity with numerical algebra. The successful applicant should have good affinity with code optimization, code debugging and testing of scientific software in a Linux (or similar Unix) environment.

The candidate should possess good social and communicative skills, a pioneering spirit and feel comfortable working in a scientific environment.

Conditions of Employment

You will be employed by the NIKHEF partner, the FOM-foundation for a fixed period of 18 month. Your salary depends on your level of experience. The conditions of employment of the FOM-foundation are defined in the Collective Labour Agreement for Research Centres (CAO-Onderzoekinstellingen), more detailed information is available at the FOM website http://www.fom.nl under Personnel.

Information

Information about FORM can be found on http://www.nikhef.nl/~form. For questions specific to this position, please contact the project leader Dr.J.Vermaseren (t68@nikhef.nl) or the head of our IT department, Mr. W. Heubers (+31 20 5922030, wimh@nikhef.nl).

Applications

The acquisition for this position starts at August 1st 2008. Letters of application, including curriculum vitae, are to be sent to:

Nikhef
att. Mr. T. van Egdom
P.O. Box 41882
NL-1009 DB Amsterdam
or by email: teus.van.egdom@nikhef.nl.

All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.