The VLBI group at University of Valencia (UVEG) offers a four-year PhD contract, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, associated with the research project "Black Holes and Relativistic Jets at the Highest Angular Resolutions", with reference PID2019-108995GB-C22.

The PhD student will focus her/his research on the implementation and exploitation of novel analysis techniques, applied to new-generation very-long-baseline-interferometry (VLBI) instruments, like the VLBI Global Observing System (VGOS) and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

Although VGOS is a system designed for high-precision Geodesy, our algorithms will enable the astronomical exploitation of this instrument, which will provide high-resolution and full-polarization observations of a large sample of active supermassive black holes (SMBH), with an unprecedented instantaneous frequency coverage. Part of this PhD project will be devoted to the implementation of these calibration algorithms in VGOS, as well as the scientific use of the expected pioneering results (a monitoring of the tomography of magnetic fields in relativistic SMBH jets at parsec scales).

A second part of the PhD project will be devoted to the scientific exploitation of VLBI observations taken at the highest radio-frequencies. These include the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT, the only existing instrument that can spatially resolve horizon-scale structures in SMBH) and the Global mm-wave VLBI Array (GMVA).

The PhD student will be supervised by Iván Martí-Vidal (i.marti-vidal@uv.es) at the University of Valencia (Valencia, Spain) and will join a research group that is providing critical contributions to the EHT project, like (among others) the development and maintenance of the ALMA-VLBI calibration algorithms and the shared coordination of the Polarimetry Working Group (PWG), responsible of the polarimetric analysis of the EHT observations for the study of horizon-scale polarized emission in nearby SMBH.

Applications must be submitted online at the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación website here, between October 13 and 27.

The UVEG promotes a diverse and inclusive environment, and encourages women and minorities to apply.

For further inquires please contact Iván Martí-Vidal at i.marti-vidal@uv.es.