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Purchasing Supervisor

Department of Physics Jobs - Thu, 02/05/2024 - 00:00

The Department of Physics is undergoing a period of exciting change as we prepare for the move to our new Ray Dolby Centre. The new facility is designed to match the most exacting standards of current research, serving the educational needs of future generations of undergraduate and graduate students much more effectively than is possible on our existing site.

We are seeking a Purchasing Supervisor to join the department's Finance Team as part of a refreshed 'core' structure for purchasing in the department. You will undertake a full range of purchasing and procurement duties within the D department's finance office, following University policy, procedures, and best practice in order to meet needs for goods and services for the wide range of activities undertaken by the department.

Reporting to the departmental Procurement Manager, the role-holder will support a team who together ensure that all purchasing adheres to best practice and guidelines issued by the University Procurement Service, in particular obtaining best value for the University whilst maintaining awareness of sustainability goals.

With experience in working with multiple stakeholder groups in a team environment, strong financial awareness, and proactive communicative skills, the successful candidate will be able to motivate and lead others to successful service delivery.

You will ideally be CIPS qualified or working towards. The role involves day-to-day contact with academic, technical and administrative staff and students and requires the ability to communicate effectively with a wide range of people.

You will provide direct purchasing and procurement support to the Department, including: providing guidance and assistance to stakeholders sourcing complex goods and services; manage a team of core buyers and undertake training and development; advise on procurement and logistics procedures in line with best practice and University regulations, maintain documentation covering local procedures; review and either respond or make recommendation on sole-source requests (dispensations) raised within the Department; preparing activity and spend reports, and identify opportunities to improve workflow.

The successful candidate will have experience of working in a busy purchasing or finance function within a large organisation; be confident and experienced in working on large-scale projects with multiple stakeholder groups; be highly numerate and have good oral and written communication skills; be skilled in dealing with financial or procurement controls and able to prioritise your own workload.

Once an offer of employment has been accepted, the successful candidate will be required to undergo a health assessment.

Applications are welcome from internal candidates who would like to apply for the role on the basis of a secondment from their current role in the University.

Interviews are expected to take place week beginning 10th June.

Click the 'Apply' button below to register an account with our recruitment system (if you have not already) and apply online.

For informal enquiries please contact Niall Taylor at nct24@cam.ac.uk.

Please quote reference KA41540 on your application and in any correspondence about this vacancy.

The University actively supports equality, diversity and inclusion and encourages applications from all sections of society.

The University has a responsibility to ensure that all employees are eligible to live and work in the UK.

Tue 26 Nov 11:15: Results of beamline testing at the MROI

Upcoming talks - Wed, 01/05/2024 - 11:14
Results of beamline testing at the MROI

TBC

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Thu 13 Jun 16:00: Title to be confirmed

Upcoming talks - Tue, 30/04/2024 - 17:01
Title to be confirmed

Abstract not available

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Thu 13 Jun 16:00: Title to be confirmed

Upcoming talks - Tue, 30/04/2024 - 17:01
Title to be confirmed

Abstract not available

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Thu 09 May 16:00: Insights into cosmological simulations from modified initial conditions

Upcoming talks - Tue, 30/04/2024 - 16:51
Insights into cosmological simulations from modified initial conditions

I will discuss the GMGalaxies programme, which is pursuing a new ‘hybrid’ approach to cosmological galaxy formation simulations combining the best of cosmological zooms and idealised approaches of the past. By customising (‘genetically modifying’) our initial conditions, we can construct controlled tests of structure formation within a fully cosmological environment. This approach has allowed us to obtain new and unique insights into ultra-faint dwarf galaxy formation, AGN -driven galaxy quenching, large scale structure formation and — in soon-to-be-released ultra-high-resolution simulations — the Milky Way fossil record seen by Gaia. In this talk, I will summarise some of these results but focus especially on recent insights into dwarf galaxy formation.

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Thu 06 Jun 16:00: Black hole accretion in the TDAMM Era

Upcoming talks - Tue, 30/04/2024 - 12:40
Black hole accretion in the TDAMM Era

Most of the power from an Active Galactic Nucleus is released close to the black hole, and thus studying accretion at event horizon scales—at the intersection of inflow and outflow—is essential for understanding how much matter accretes and grows the black hole vs. how much matter is ejected, thus effecting the black hole’s large-scale environments. In the past decade, we have had a breakthrough in how we probe the inner accretion flow, through the discovery of X-ray Reverberation Mapping, where X-rays produced close to the black hole reverberate off inflowing gas. By measuring reverberation time delays, we can quantify the effects of strongly curved space time and measure black hole spin, which is key for understanding how efficiently energy can be tapped from the accretion process. In this talk, I will give an overview of this field, and will show how extending these spectral-timing techniques to extreme, transient (and possibly multi-messenger) accretion events like Tidal Disruption Events and Quasi Periodic Eruptions can help us understand the growth and impact of black holes in galactic centers.

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Fri 05 Jul 11:30: Title to be confirmed

Upcoming talks - Tue, 30/04/2024 - 10:26
Title to be confirmed

Abstract not available

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Fri 03 May 13:00: Black Hole Entropy for Higher Curvature Gravity with Higher Spin Fields

Upcoming talks - Mon, 29/04/2024 - 17:48
Black Hole Entropy for Higher Curvature Gravity with Higher Spin Fields

Assuming a Killing horizon background, we generalise the linear null Raychaudhuri equation to higher curvature gravity with spin s ≥ 2 bosonic fields, and we attempt to extract the black hole entropy from the Raychaudhuri equation at the linear order of dynamical perturbation. Unlike pure gravity, scalar fields, and vector fields, we show that an additional “integrability condition” must be satisfied by the higher spin theory/field in order to extract a “sensible” entropy formula. We test this condition in several examples and speculate about its role for higher spin theories.

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Mon 20 May 14:00: Title to be confirmed

Upcoming talks - Mon, 29/04/2024 - 17:22
Title to be confirmed

Abstract not available

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Tue 21 May 14:00: Title to be confirmed

Upcoming talks - Mon, 29/04/2024 - 17:19
Title to be confirmed

Abstract not available

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Tue 14 May 11:15: Blue Phase Liquid Crystals & Their Potential for Astronomy

Upcoming talks - Mon, 29/04/2024 - 14:53
Blue Phase Liquid Crystals & Their Potential for Astronomy

Adaptive optics is a technique used to reduce the effects of aberration on wavefront propagation, used to correct for the light distortion which appears due to atmospheric turbulence. Customarily, in astronomy, systems employed for this purpose use deformable or adaptive mirrors as correctors, which are costly and mechanically actuated.

As opposed to a classic deformable mirror, which requires actuators to change its shape, a Liquid Crystal Wavefront Corrector (LCWFC) uses its inherent birefringence to act as a phase modulator and correct the incoming wavefront. Despite its reduced size and cost, LCWF Cs have historically suffered from a large response time, which makes them less desirable over typical solutions.

Blue Phases will be introduced as an alternative correcting medium. They have the potential to overcome the usual limitations of liquid crystal devices. Their working principle and typical design considerations will be presented, as well as progress made in making these devices a reality.

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Tue 28 May 13:00: Title to be confirmed

Upcoming talks - Mon, 29/04/2024 - 11:47
Title to be confirmed

TBA

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Wed 01 May 14:00: Resolution: New Insights from Modular Symmetry in Conformal Field Theory

Upcoming talks - Mon, 29/04/2024 - 01:04
Resolution: New Insights from Modular Symmetry in Conformal Field Theory

I will explain how tools from the theory of modular forms may be used to resolve operator spectra of conformal field theories. This leads to a quantitative framework for diagnosing quantum chaos and random matrix behavior in field theory and gravity.

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Mon 29 Apr 14:00: The Conditions for Warping and Breaking Protoplanetary Discs

Upcoming talks - Fri, 26/04/2024 - 11:53
The Conditions for Warping and Breaking Protoplanetary Discs

The study of warped discs was once limited to the viscous accretion discs around black holes. Now, high resolution observations indicate that the warping and breaking of protoplanetary discs is not uncommon and there is growing interest from the planet formation community in these effects. Warping and breaking alter the evolution of the disc, for example by enhancing the accretion rate and changing the chemical composition. However, our understanding of the conditions under which protoplanetary discs warp and/or tear remains far more limited than for black hole discs. I will present the conclusions from our high-resolution simulations and discuss what factors affect whether and where a protoplanetary disc will break and how this differs from the commonly referenced theoretical predictions. Finally, I will share some examples of observed disc systems that we still can’t explain and suggest avenues for future research.

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Wed 01 May 15:00: The next-generation Event Horizon Telescope: from Still Images to Video.

Upcoming talks - Fri, 26/04/2024 - 11:00
The next-generation Event Horizon Telescope: from Still Images to Video.

The next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) is a transformative upgrade to the EHT that will realize black hole “cinema”: real-time and time-lapse movies of supermassive black holes on event horizon scales. These movies will resolve complex structure and dynamics on Schwarzschild radius dimensions, bringing into focus not just the persistent strong-field gravity features predicted by General Relativity (GR), but details of active accretion and relativistic jet launching that drive large scale structure in the Universe. This effort builds upon recent results by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT): the first image of M87 ’s supermassive black hole and its magnetic field structure, as well as resolved images of SgrA*, the central black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. These images are scientifically rich, and show that evolution of the EHT to a more capable array can address even deeper questions across physics and astronomy. The central concept behind the ngEHT is that the addition of modest-diameter dishes at new geographic locations and multi-color observations over a range of frequencies will enable the next revolution in horizon-resolved black hole studies. This talk will cover the ngEHT technical plans and scientific goals.

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Tue 30 Apr 11:15: Radio observations of extra-galactic transients with the AMI-LA telescope

Upcoming talks - Thu, 25/04/2024 - 00:18
Radio observations of extra-galactic transients with the AMI-LA telescope

The Arcminute Microkelvin Imager – Large Array has been instrumental in the study of radio transients. In this talk I will give an overview of the current extragalactic transients monitoring program which is running on AMI -LA. To demonstrate the power of AMI -LA in improving our shock physics in extragalactic transients I will go through two examples of events where AMI -LA has been instrumental. Starting with the most relativistic systems: GRBs have been observed by AMI -LA from as early as 2012 with the ALARRM rapid follow up system. GRB 221009A , also known as the brightest of all time, has demonstrated the unparalleled temporal coverage achievable with AMI -LA from a few hours to over 100 days post burst. AMI -LA has also enabled us to draw conclusions that wouldn’t be possible with other facilities such as the jetted tidal disruption event AT2022cmc that was first reported in 2022. Due to the high cadence light curve with AMI -LA, we were able to prove for the first time, in a model independent manner that the radio emission originated from a highly relativistic outflow. Such a result has been vital in terms of our understand of tidal disruption events and can now infer the presence of off-axis jets such as AT2018hyz.

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Mon 29 Apr 13:00: Cosmology from Non-Gaussian fields

Upcoming talks - Wed, 24/04/2024 - 12:19
Cosmology from Non-Gaussian fields

In this talk I will discuss several challenges towards detecting primordial non-Gaussianties. With the CMB running out of modes, we have started focussing on large scale structure. Measurements of the 21cm brightness temperature allow us to observe almost our entire past light cone. Based on comoving volume arguments, the epoch starting during the dark ages and ending the epoch of reionzation (EoR) potentially contain a lot of modes. Besides being hard to detect, even at these high redshifts, when modes were more linear, I will argue both signal confusion and non-Gaussian covariance have to be considered. During the EoR, the tracer field is very non-Gaussian and standard summary statistics might no longer suffice. I will discuss how machine learning could help solving some of these challenges, while also benefiting efforts to understand astrophysical evolution during these epochs. Finally, ML applications in cosmology are rapidly developing. We should remain cautious and apply common sense. I will discuss an example of what could happen if we don’t.

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Thu 13 Jun 11:30: Title to be confirmed

Upcoming talks - Wed, 24/04/2024 - 10:24
Title to be confirmed

Abstract not available

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Fri 26 Apr 13:00: Uniqueness of extremal black holes in de Sitter

Upcoming talks - Mon, 22/04/2024 - 17:49
Uniqueness of extremal black holes in de Sitter

Uniqueness theorems for black holes with a cosmological constant are only known in a few limited cases. In my talk I present a recent uniqueness theorem for the extremal Schwarzschild-de Sitter black hole within the class of analytic vacuum spacetimes with a positive cosmological constant containing a static extremal Killing horizon. The proof is based on establishing the uniqueness of transverse deformations to the near-horizon geometry at each order in the transverse parameter. I also present a generalisation to charged extremal black holes in de Sitter and discuss the analogous problem in the case of negative cosmological constant. The talk is based on 2309.04238 [gr-qc] and 2403.08467 [gr-qc].

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Mon 13 May 10:00: Which universes does the no-boundary wave function favour?

Upcoming talks - Mon, 22/04/2024 - 09:07
Which universes does the no-boundary wave function favour?

Please notice the unusual schedule (9:45am) and location (MR9) due to previous overlaps with the Dirac lunch and Dirac lecture.

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