CERN-Egypt Doctoral Studentship

This is a chance to carry out your PhD at the forefront of science. CERN is the largest laboratory for understanding the physics of our universe. With this program you have the opportunity to spend up to 24 months at CERN working closely with experts in a very diverse set of fields at the cutting edge of technology, including Physics, computer science and more.

Thesis: The search for Higgs boson pair production

One of the major priorities of the LHC physics program is the measurement, with increasing precision, of the properties of the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is the only scalar particle in the standard model (SM), and this unique characteristic begs for exhaustive exploration of its properties. Deviations from its expected properties from the SM will provide a sign of physics beyond SM (BSM). For instance, one of the next big milestones at the LHC is the study of the Higgs self coupling, which is the cornerstone of the Electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism, and hence directly connected to the BSM physics.

To this end, the thesis will focus on the design and conduction of a search for Higgs boson pairs in the vector boson fusion (VBF) production mode using the upcoming LHC Run 3 data. The VBF production mode is a powerful probe of BSM physics, since even small modifications to the couplings of the Higgs boson to vector bosons result in significant deviations in the properties of the Higgs boson pair. The analysis will target Higgs boson pair production, where each Higgs boson decays to a pair of bottom quarks. This decay mode of the Higgs boson has the largest branching fraction between the possible Higgs decay modes corresponding to ~60% probability. The cornerstone of the thesis is the development of sophisticated analysis methods to separate the signal from the abundant background, and the development of a powerful bottom quark identification algorithm. In both cases state-of-the-art machine learning techniques will be critical to achieve the necessary sensitivity.

Become a CERN-Egypt Doctoral Student 

In partnership with Egypt , and with their financial support, CERN is launching a capacity-building studentship. This initiative aims to support doctoral students with exceptional potential to carry out research at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and other CERN experimental facilities.

As a Doctoral Student you would benefit from exposure to world-class research and technology, and have a CERN supervisor to support you in your research and development, whether you already have a thesis subject defined with your home university, or are still looking for a thesis subject.

This is a chance to work on your doctoral thesis while spending up to two years at CERN, at the forefront of science, over a period of three years. If you are studying Physics, Engineering or Computer Science, this is an invitation to further your knowledge in a truly unique organisation, to get involved in world-famous experiments of unprecedented scale and scope, including the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and to bring back to your university and country new skills and expertise.