The DIEP NWA-ORC consortium Emergence at All Scales will be opening 20 postdoc and PhD positions in the coming year at various universities, national institutes and Statistics Netherlands. The current open positions are described below:

Hydrodynamics of spin for extreme matter (U. Amsterdam and U. Utrecht). The project aims at developing hydrodynamic theories that include spin degrees of freedom using the framework of approximate symmetries and holography with the goal of understanding phases of the quark-gluon plasma and other forms of extreme matter. One of the project's goals is to combine spin degrees of freedom with superfluidity and magnetic fields and extract relevant phenomenological features. 



Emergence of primordial cosmic structures (U. Groningen). The project aims at investigating the emergence of primordial structures that have seeded the structure formation of the Universe. The focus of this research will be on multiple quantum degrees of freedom in the primordial Universe. First, to classify the universality classes of the emergent behaviour of these multi-component systems and derive the resulting correlators. And second, to understand the role of emergent space-time symmetries in these systems, using these to characterize and determine the primordial correlators that have generated cosmic structures.



Origin and emergence of spacetime symmetries (Radboud University Nijmegen). This project aims to elucidate the role of spacetime symmetries like cosmological isometries and de Sitter- or Lorentz invariance, which are usually taken for granted in descriptions of the very early universe, in a nonperturbative Planckian regime, where spacetime is highly quantum-fluctuating. Using lattice gravity methods based on causal dynamical triangulations, a key goal is to construct microscopic symmetry precursors, and investigate if and how (approximate) symmetries can emerge under coarse-graining.



Spacetime emergence: real and simulated data (University of Groningen). The project will be on observational signatures sourced by the emergence of spacetime and primordial structures from inflation. The student will explore both existing methods, such as standard summary statistics, as well as yet-to-be-fully matured methods, such as those rooted in persistent homology and likelihood-free inference. The PhD researcher will combine observations of the large-scale structure and the cosmic microwave background with future direct probes of gravitational waves.