The Department of Physics and Astronomy is one of the major departments in the University of Sheffield. The Department is composed of 45 academic staff and research fellows, over 50 research associates, 9 technical staff, and in excess of 500 undergraduate and over 100 postgraduate students. It has active research programmes in soft matter physics, semiconductor physics, astrophysics, high-energy particle physics and particle astrophysics, and biological physics. All of these groups contribute to a dynamic research environment.
The Department has seen very significant strategic development in recent years. There has also been a large increase in grant income, which has quadrupled since 2000. Undergraduate and postgraduate numbers have also risen significantly since then. These factors together give the department a very strong foundation. The department was rated as the top UK physics department for student satisfaction (99%) in the National Student Survey (NSS) 2014. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), the department had over 90% of its research graded as either world-leading or internationally excellent, putting it among the top 10 in the UK.
Involvement in the project
Main role will be to model cosmic-ray (including muons) transport and detection using a realistic model of the tomographic system for future event reconstruction and imaging. With an input from the initial simulations of and the data from the prototype detector, USFD will also be responsible for the optimization of the full-scale tomographic system. In this project USFD will participate in WP3 and WP4. The work will focus on modelling cosmic-ray muons, detector response and detector optimisation (both for the prototype detector and large-scale version). USFD will also work on simulation of background from radioactivity that may affect track reconstruction and on improvement in material recognition using simultaneous detection of gamma rays and neutrons.