Post Doctoral position : SEXTANTS Beamline

SOLEIL is the French national synchrotron facility, located on the Saclay Plateau near Paris. It is a multi-disciplinary instrument and research laboratory whose mission is to conduct research using synchrotron radiation, to develop cutting edge instrumentation on the beamlines, and to make these developments available to the scientific community. SOLEIL synchrotron, a unique tool for both academic research and industrial applications across a wide range of disciplines including physics, biology, chemistry etc., opened in 2008. It is used annually by thousands researchers from France and abroad. SOLEIL is based on a synchrotron source that is state-of-the-art both in terms of brilliance and stability. This large scale facility, a partner of the Université Paris Saclay, is a “publically owned” private company, founded by the CNRS and the CEA.

The Synchrotron SOLEIL opens an 18 months postdoctoral position at the SEXTANTS beamline. SEXTANTS was specifically designed to investigate electronic and magnetic properties of materials through elastic, inelastic and coherent scattering of soft X-ray photons (50 eV – 1500 eV).  This postdoctoral position is open on the Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering (RIXS) branch of the beamline. The RIXS end-station was recently upgraded with a unique sample environment allowing performing experiments under electric and magnetic field. Furthermore, thanks to a tight collaboration with electron spectro-microscopy group of the “Laboratoire des Physiques des Solides”, it has been recently equipped with an optical setup for coupling RIXS experiment with X-ray emitted optical luminescence (XEOL).

This 18 months postdoctoral position is funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) within a collaborative project between different research teams with complementary expertise in spectroscopy techniques: X-ray spectroscopy (Soleil Synchrotron), electron energy loss spectroscopy (Paris-Saclay University) optical spectroscopy (University of Montpellier), and theoretical spectroscopy (Rome Tor-Vergata University).

I.MISSION

The postdoc will work at the RIXS branch of the SEXTANTS beamline with the following tasks:

• Be in charge of a research program aiming to initiate a novel research activity coupling RIXS and XEOL experiments in tight collaboration with the other partners of the project. This will include also the possibility to perform RIXS and XEOL experiments under applied electric and magnetic fields.
• Integrate the XEOL setup in the acquisition control of the beamline and develop the analysis tools required by coupled RIXS and XEOL experiments.
• Besides this in-house research program, the candidate will host external user teams on the RIXS branch.

II.Experience required

The candidate must hold a PhD in Physics, material science, Physical chemistry or similar research fields. A research experience in the field of X-ray and/or electron spectroscopies is strongly recommended.

Moreover, the following expertise will be considered with particular attention:

• Research experience in XEOL, RIXS or electron energy loss spectroscopies.
• A solid background in solid state physics
• Teamwork skills
• Knowledge of French is not mandatory, but a fluent level of spoken and written English is required

III.General condition

The contract is for one year renewable once upon mutual agreement.

All applications must include:

• Curriculum vitae
• List of publications
• Motivation letter
• Two referees.

Candidatures should be addressed by e-mail to Alessandro Nicolaou and Alberto Zobelli

alessandro.nicolaou@synchrotron-soleil.fr

alberto.zobelli@universite-paris-saclay.fr