Compton Spectrometer and Imager

The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) project has an opening for a graduate student who is interested in working in the area of high-energy astrophysics. COSI is a wide field gamma-ray imager designed for studies of electron/positron annihilation emission, nuclear lines, and polarization of emission from compact objects and gamma-ray bursts. COSI uses a state-of-the-art germanium gamma-ray detection system. 

COSI graduate students will have the opportunity to work on hardware projects, software development, and to gain expertise in the science topics that can be addressed with COSI’s all-sky gamma-ray survey. Software tasks include designing COSI’s data analysis pipeline and developing the next generation of analysis algorithms for gamma-ray astronomy. Students will be involved in:

• Hardware and electronics testing
• Improving our Python-based ground support software system
• Detector calibration and automated analysis
• Improving the COSI detector effects engine (benchmarking simulations with detector calibrations)
• Enhancing the data analysis pipeline with machine learning (event reconstruction, background identification, real-time transient localization, etc.)
• Developing new analysis approaches for all-sky imaging, spectral, and polarization analysis

The specific selection of available tasks above will depend on the progress in the timeline of the project, and the student’s experience and preferences.

For more details about COSI, please see http://cosi.ssl.berkeley.edu/. For more information, contact Dr. John Tomsick (jtomsickATberkeley.edu) for general questions or Dr. Andreas Zoglauer (zoglauerATberkeley.edu) for data analysis questions.