Research Associate Physics

What you'd do

• Establish and document the OCMM baseline, including hardware configuration, sensor and stage behavior, calibration records, and reproducible operating procedures.
• Perform controlled experiments to characterize and separate sensor noise, mounting compliance, mechanical drift, thermal effects, and reconstruction-induced errors.
• Diagnose sensor range limitations and data dropouts, then develop protocols to flag invalid or marginal measurements and evaluate their impact on reconstructed profiles.
• Improve the robustness of the OCMM surface-reconstruction method using singular value decomposition to identify and characterize poorly constrained measurement modes.
• Screen and optimize candidate measurement geometries through analytical analysis and experimental validation.
• Develop and integrate validated scan and reconstruction strategies into acquisition and analysis software.
• Implement quality checks and automated diagnostics to detect anomalous inputs, missing samples, range violations, inconsistent geometries, and configuration mismatches.
• Validate the controlled OCMM workflow using progressively more demanding X-ray mirror reference surfaces.
• Compare OCMM measurements with high-quality reference data from NSP, FSI, CSI, and other BNL metrology methods, document registration, filtering, aperture, and quantitative agreement or discrepancies.
• Provide root-cause analysis when hardware limits prevent reliable measurement of demanding mirrors and identify mitigation strategies or system upgrades.