SFU High Energy Physics

Join us

Do research at the frontier of physics

Analyze collisions from the world's largest particle accelerator, hunt for neutrinos from deep space, or help build a telescope on the floor of the Pacific. We welcome graduate and undergraduate students who want to try.

Photo: the LHC tunnel, by Julian Herzog, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

100 munderground at CERN, Geneva
2,450 mdeep in the Antarctic ice
2,700 mdown on the Pacific seafloor

Choose your experiment

Students join one of three experiments, each in one of the most extreme places on Earth. Most combine physics analysis with hands-on work on the detector.

At the Large Hadron Collider

ATLAS

Measure the Higgs boson and search for new particles with machine learning, and assemble and test petals for the new ATLAS tracker with the SFU and TRIUMF team.

Research areas for students →
At the South Pole

IceCube

Track down the sources of cosmic neutrinos, measure how neutrinos change type as they cross the Earth, and search the data for dark matter, in a collaboration of more than 450 people in 14 countries.

Research areas for students →
In the deep Pacific

P‑ONE

A young experiment that students help shape: build calibration hardware, track the detector lines as they sway in the currents, and analyze the very first data.

Research areas for students →

What you'll learn

Whichever experiment you join, you'll pick up skills that are in demand in physics and well beyond it.

Data analysis

Find a rare signal in a mountain of data, with statistics and machine learning.

Detector hardware

Build and test real detector parts, from tracker petals to deep-sea instruments.

Computing at scale

Run analyses over petabytes on the ATLAS Tier-1 centre and national supercomputers.

Global teamwork

Work in international collaborations and present your results to them.

MSc and PhD

Graduate students

  1. Pick an experiment

    Read about ATLAS, IceCube and P‑ONE and see which research areas excite you.

  2. Contact a supervisor

    Email a faculty member on that experiment (see who to contact). Say what interests you and ask whether they are taking students.

  3. Apply

    Apply through the SFU Department of Physics.

From first year

Undergraduate research

  1. First year: Adopt-a-Physicist

    First-year physics students can be "adopted" by a research group: join group meetings and gradually take part in the research. About Adopt-a-Physicist

  2. Summer research awards

    Undergraduate Student Research Awards (USRA) fund summer research. Canadian citizens and permanent residents apply for the NSERC award; international students for the SFU VPR Sciences award. About USRA at SFU Physics

  3. Ask about other positions

    Summer and co-op research positions are sometimes available. Email a faculty member to ask.

Who to contact

Not sure where to start? Get in touch with a faculty member on the experiment that interests you.

ATLAS

IceCube

P‑ONE

Curious what students work on? Meet our current students or read past theses.

Ready to get in touch?

Meet the faculty and find someone whose research excites you.

Meet the faculty

Photos: ATLAS detector by CERN, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. P-ONE modules by Simon Fraser University. IceCube Lab by the U.S. Geological Survey, public domain, via USGS.