We are about to advertise five 2.5 years post-doc positions in the DARKER group
at the INAF Institute for Radioastronomy (Bologna headquarters).
If you are interested in joining the group, please take a look at the overview of the project, and send me an email to receive more info and updates about these post-doc positions.
Currently, the cosmological applications of strong gravitational lensing are limited by the paucity of lensing systems known.
Finding novel and effective ways to identify strong lenses represents a new challenge that has to be addressed now, when expensive missions with the same goals of DARKER (like Euclid) have started to release their data. DARKER aims at timely facing this challenge by innovatively finding hundreds of lenses using long-term monitoring programmes.
Two positions will be devoted to high-time-resolution programmes at high energies to search for low-mass lenses, which are currently missed by standard lens-search techniques. The abundance of low-mass lenses is a key constraint to the nature of dark matter (i.e., cold versus alternative dark matter particle models).
Time series photometry from optical all-sky surveys will be exploited to discover hundreds of new variable lensing systems, which largely exceed the minimum number of lenses necessary to constrain H0 at 1% precision level. This estimate will be truly independent of any other cosmological probe, and is required to shed light on the current H0 tension from local and early Universe probes, which deeply challenges the ΛCDM cosmology. This precision is expected to be the best among the local Universe probes. Three post-doc positions will be devoted to this part of the project.