eth zurich physics phd salary

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Institute for Theoretical Physics

Doctoral studies are carried out in individual research groups, combining original research with specialised doctorate courses and teaching activities.

Prospective Students

The institute is constantly looking for prospective PhD students. Generally, interested persons should get in touch with one of the  research groups of the institute. More information about doctoral studies in physics at ETH Zurich can be found at the  Department of Physics and at the Doctoral Administration of the ETH Academic Services.

Online Applications

The institute hosts an online application system at http://jobs.itp.phys.ethz.ch/phd/ . It lists the participanting groups, their present search status as well as particular openings for PhD positions.  

Typically, candidates should supply a curriculum vitae and information on their previous study. Furthermore, two established scientists should send in reference letters in support of the application. The application material should be uploaded to the website. The applications received will be reviewed periodically (as a rule of thumb, 4 times per year).

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Quantum Center

Quantum center research fellowship.

The Quantum Center Research Fellowship program funds PhD students and postdocs hosted by research groups of the Quantum Center at ETH Zurich.

The objective of the Quantum Center Research Fellowship program is to fund PhD students and postdocs hosted by member groups of the Quantum Center at ETH Zurich. It supports innovative and original scientific research that fits well into the context of the host group while fostering the independence of the fellow. In addition, the fellows will be responsible for helping to bring together the PhD and postdoc community in the Quantum Center, for example by organizing technical exchange events or social activities.

The Quantum Center is committed to increasing diversity in quantum science, and candidates from under-represented groups are especially encouraged to apply. Furthermore, applications in groups of young PIs and PIs with small group sizes are equally encouraged. The Quantum Center Research Fellowship is endowed by the “Dr. Alfred and Flora Spälti Fonds “.

Opening date: December 1, 2023 Application deadline: February 20, 2024, 23:59 pm Decision date: May 1, 2024 Starting date: Within six months of the decision date If there are many competitive applications, the selection committee may choose to interview the candidates.  

Application

Please submit your application via the ETH online application portal .

PhD and postdoc candidates who are supported by a member of the Quantum Center are eligible to apply. Applications have to be made jointly by the candidate and the potential host . Each PI can support only one application in a given call. PIs hosting successful candidates are not eligible to support candidates in the following call. PhD candidates are expected to have completed or be close to completion of a Master’s degree. They have to meet the general admission requirements for a doctorate at ETH Zurich. Relevant information can be found on the website of the Doctoral Administration of ETH Zurich . Postdoc candidates must not have been employed at ETH Zurich for more than one year at the time of the application deadline. Applicants with a PhD from ETH Zurich will not be considered.

PhD fellowships

PhD students funded by the Quantum Center Research Fellowship program are employed according to the regulations of ETH Zurich. The fellowship covers the full salary of a PhD student for three years according to the usual rates at ETH Zurich. In addition, a grant of up to 5'000 CHF per year for consumables may be awarded. To be accepted as a PhD fellow, the requirements of the Doctoral Administration of ETH Zurich must be met. The fellow will have to register as a graduate student at ETH Zurich and will be awarded a doctoral degree from ETH Zurich upon successful completion of the doctoral thesis. Details regarding the doctorate are according to ETH regulations and committees.

Postdoctoral fellowships

The fellowship covers the salary for one postdoc for up to two years. Postdoctoral fellows will be employed in accordance with the regulations of ETH Zurich, and salaries will be paid according to the ETH standard (100%). In addition, a grant of up to 5'000 CHF per year for consumables may be awarded.

Employment at ETH Zurich

Information on the employment at ETH Zurich and salaries for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers can be found here .

The following documents have to be submitted in a single file in PDF format:

• Motivation letter ( to be written by the candidate and not to exceed 1 page )
• Letter of support from the host PI
• Part 1: Research plan. Please use the template "Part 1: Research Plan"
• Part 2: Additional Documents . Please use the template "Part 2: Additional Documents"
• CV of candidate ( not to exceed 2 pages )

For postdoc applications, in addition:

• Reference letter(s) from PhD supervisor(s). Please request these letter(s) well in advance. The supervisor will receive a link to submit the reference letter only after you have submitted your application. Reference letters are accepted up to 10 days after the application deadline.
• If applicable: a certification of the planned date of the defence signed by the advisor or department chair if the doctorate has not yet been completed.

For PhD applications, in addition:

• Copies of University degree(s) / transcripts with all grades
• Download Part 1: Research Plan (DOCX, 36 KB) vertical_align_bottom
• Download Part 2: Additional Documents (DOCX, 36 KB) vertical_align_bottom

Please submit the documents through the ETH online application portal .

The applications are submitted as files in PDF format via the ETH application portal by following the steps below:

• Step 1: Log in to the authentication system
• Step 2: Start a new application -> New application
• Step 3: Choose a program -> Quantum Center Research Fellowships ( Postdocs) or Quantum Center Research Fellowships (PhD)
• Step 4: Upload the required documents
• Step 5: Applicants for a postdoctoral position: please provide the contact information of your PhD supervisor(s) for reference letter(s). Once you have submitted your application, the supervisor will automatically receive a link to upload the reference letter. Reference letters can be submitted until 10 days after the submission deadline.
• Step 6: Submit the application

All applications will be reviewed by a Selection Committee consisting of members of the Quantum Center.

Program Chair and Scientific Lead

Prof. Dr. Yiwen Chu, contact details Prof. Dr. Tilman Esslinger, contact details

Program Coordination and Administration

Dr. Francesca Bay Dr. Philipp Kammerlander

Further information

• chevron_right Doctoral studies at D-INFK
• chevron_right Doctoral studies at D-ITET
• chevron_right Doctoral studies at D-MAVT
• chevron_right Doctoral studies at D-PHYS

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Department of Physics

Main content, further information.

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• chevron_right ETH Event Calendar
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Stand up for respect!

Surprising reversal in quantum systems

• Quantum sciences

Could the cosmos be dominated by particles that move faster than the speed of light ? This model of the universe agrees surprisingly well with observations, a pair of physicists has discovered.

In a new paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed, the physicists propose that our universe is dominated by tachyons — a hypothetical kind of particle that always moves faster than light. Tachyons almost certainly don't exist; going faster than light violates everything we know about the causal flow of time from past to future. But the hypothetical particles are still interesting to physicists because of the small chance that even our most closely held notions, like causality, might be wrong.

The researchers suggest that tachyons might be the true identity of dark matter , the mysterious form of matter that makes up most of the mass of almost every single galaxy in the universe, outweighing normal matter 5 to 1. Astronomers and physicists alike currently do not know what dark matter is made of, so they are free to cook up all manner of ideas —– because, after all, sometimes a far-out idea is right, and even if it's wrong, it can help us on the path to a better understanding.

The researchers calculate that an expanding universe filled with tachyons can initially slow down in its expansion before reaccelerating. Our universe is currently in an accelerating phase, driven by a phenomenon known as dark energy , so this tachyon cosmological model can potentially explain both dark energy and dark matter at the same time.

Related: There may be a 'dark mirror' universe within ours where atoms failed to form, new study suggests

To test this idea, the physicists applied their model to observations of Type Ia supernovae, a kind of stellar explosion that allows cosmologists to build a relationship between distance and the expansion rate of the universe . It was through Type Ia supernovae that astronomers in the late 1990s first discovered that the universe's expansion rate is accelerating.

The physicists found that a tachyon cosmological model was just as good at explaining the supernova data as the standard cosmological model involving dark matter and dark energy. That itself is a surprise, given how unorthodox this idea is.

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However, that's only the beginning. We now have access to a wealth of data about the large-scale universe, like the cosmic microwave background (remnant radiation released just after the Big Bang) and the arrangement of galaxies at the very largest scales. The next step is to continue testing this idea against those additional observations.

— Millions of invisible 'mirror stars' could exist in the Milky Way, and astronomers know how to find them

— 1st images from the Euclid 'dark universe' telescope are here — and they're jaw-dropping

— Large Hadron Collider could be generating dark matter in its particle jets

The tachyon cosmological model is unlikely to pass those rigorous experimental tests, given the unlikely nature of tachyons. But continuing to push in new, even unorthodox, directions is important in cosmology ; we never know when we might get a breakthrough. Scientists have been attempting to understand dark matter for 50 years and dark energy for a quarter century, without any conclusive results. The solutions to these conundrums are likely to come from unexpected directions.

The team's research was published to the preprint database arXiv in March.

Paul M. Sutter is a research professor in astrophysics at  SUNY Stony Brook University and the Flatiron Institute in New York City. He regularly appears on TV and podcasts, including  "Ask a Spaceman." He is the author of two books, "Your Place in the Universe" and "How to Die in Space," and is a regular contributor to Space.com, Live Science, and more. Paul received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, and spent three years at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, followed by a research fellowship in Trieste, Italy. 

Millions of invisible 'mirror stars' could exist in the Milky Way, and astronomers know how to find them

Large Hadron Collider could be generating dark matter in its particle jets

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• William. walker39 Could it be possible that the tachyons needed to explain Dark Matter can be explained by Superluminal Nearfield Electromagnetic and or Gravitational fields! It is now well known that Gravity and Electromagnetic fields propagate instantaneously in the nearfield and reduce to the speed of light in the farfield, after propagating about 1 wavelength from the source. Both theoretical and experimental evidence is presented and has been confirmed by many independent researchers over the past 20 years. This result is incompatible with Relativity theory and analysis shows that the Special Relativistic effects on time and space are an optical illusion. The same is true for General Relativity since it is based on Special Relativity. It is proposed that Galilean Relativity and Gravitoelectromagnetism theory of gravity are better theories for Relativity and Gravity, where time and space are absolute, and only the present exists. Since Gravitoelectromagnetism assumes gravity is a propagating field, it can be quantized (graviton), enabling the unification of Gravity and Quantum Mechanics. The Pilot Wave interpretation of Quantum Mechanics now becomes the preferred interpretation of Quantum Mechanics because it is completely compatible with Galilean Relativity, and instantaneous propagating fields. *YouTube presentation of above argument: sePdJ7vSQvQ:0 View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sePdJ7vSQvQ&t=0s *Paper this presentation is based on: William D. Walker and Dag Stranneby, New Interpretation of Relativity, 2023 http://vixra.org/abs/2309.0145 *New experiment paper: https://www.techrxiv.org/doi/full/10.36227/techrxiv.170862178.82175798/v1 Dr William Walker, Physicist, PhD ETH Zurich 1997 Reply
• tcny2023 Re: Tachyons almost certainly don't exist; going faster than light violates everything we know about the causal flow of time from past to future. It's been my amateur understanding that Einstein's theory doesn't forbid faster than light travel, but rather states that objects with mass cannot be accelerated to the speed of light. Because in order to do so it would require an infinite amount of energy since mass moves off towards infinity as an object's speed approaches light speed. But if an object were somehow already moving at light speed it wouldn't be a violation. Am I wrong? Reply

tcny2023 said: Re: Tachyons almost certainly don't exist; going faster than light violates everything we know about the causal flow of time from past to future. It's been my amateur understanding that Einstein's theory doesn't forbid faster than light travel, but rather states that objects with mass cannot be accelerated to the speed of light. Because in order to do so it would require an infinite amount of energy since mass moves off towards infinity as an object's speed approaches light speed. But if an object were somehow already moving at light speed it wouldn't be a violation. Am I wrong?

William. walker39 said: Could it be possible that the tachyons needed to explain Dark Matter can be explained by Superluminal Nearfield Electromagnetic and or Gravitational fields! . . . It is now well known that Gravity and Electromagnetic fields propagate instantaneously in the nearfield and reduce to the speed of light in the farfield, after propagating about *YouTube presentation of above argument: *Paper this presentation is based on: William D. Walker and Dag Stranneby, New Interpretation of Relativity, 2023 http://vixra.org/abs/2309.0145 *New experiment paper: https://www.techrxiv.org/doi/full/10.36227/techrxiv.170862178.82175798/v1 Dr William Walker, Physicist, PhD ETH Zurich 1997

admin said: With the nature of the universe's two most elusive components up for debate, physicists have proposed a radical idea: Invisible particles called tachyons, which break causality and move faster than light, may dominate the cosmos. The universe may be dominated by particles that break causality and move faster than light, new paper suggests : Read more

danr2222 said: Non-causality is a feature , not a bug, in this theory. Causality-breaking is offensive to logic/philosophy buffs, but not to (many) theoretical physicists.

• View All 8 Comments

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ETH for Development  

Teaching at the conflict research network west africa.

Claudia Wiehler, PhD candidate at the Center for Security Studies, shares about what she learned during her time teaching in Nigeria through an ETH4D Faculty Exchange grant. 

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Claudia, you are a PhD candidate at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zürich. Can you tell us a little bit about your research and the types of questions you engage with on a daily basis?

I research armed conflicts from the perspective of political science. This means I am interested in the question of why armed conflicts emerge and how we can understand their dynamics – that is, their escalation and de-escalation, their spatial variation, etc. In my PhD project, I investigate how civil wars are interlinked with other, more localized types of collective violence, for example between different livelihood or religious communities. I use social network analysis to theorize and empirically assess these interlinkages. Doing so, I focus on the armed conflicts in Nigeria. Nigeria has been affected by the highly violent Boko Haram conflict between violent extremists and the government, but also by conflicts between farmers and herders, banditry, and ethno-religiious tensions.

Can you tell us about the external page Conflict Research Network West Africa (CORN) call_made , and how your relationship came to be?

CORN is a knowledge platform and academic community for conflict researchers in West Africa, and particularly Nigeria. They conduct workshops and conferences and publish working papers, among other things. I had followed their activities on social media, which always sounded super interesting. I had also briefly been in touch with their Director, Tarila Marclint Ebiede, when planning my own research stay in Nigeria two years before.

The idea for the workshop came up when I saw that CORN is conducting a workshop to train early career researchers in the quantitative analysis of the same dataset I am using in my work (called Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset, ACLED). I reached out to them, offering to teach a session on social network analysis as part of the course. After some discussions, we decided that it would be more useful to have a separate workshop on social network analysis, not least because of the complexity of the approach. Luckily, this was possible with the financial support by ETH4D.

What made you decide to conduct a Teaching Stay at CORN? What was the experience like?

I had thought about the possibility of teaching in Nigeria before, also considering organizing a workshop on my own. Looking back, I am very glad I decided to do it with CORN, as this made things much easier and allowed me to expand my own network. On the one hand, CORN did an amazing job in recruiting the participants and organizing the logistics, including for myself. This way, I could focus on the content of the course and did not have to worry about anything else. This was also a great relief in terms of workload during my last year of the PhD.

On the other hand, the connection to CORN was super valuable for me to get in touch with Nigerian researchers and learn more about their work. We had planned the workshop as a pre-event for a conference on social protection organized by CORN, which meant that many researchers from other regions had come to the capital Abuja. This was super useful for me and also allowed some of the workshop participants to stay for the conference.

Do you have a sense of what your students took away from your stay? What did you learn from them?

A three-day workshop was an ambitious timeframe to introduce the participants to a new theoretical perspective, analytical method, and software. The main goal of the workshop was thus to provide a basic introduction, which would allow the scholars to deepen their understanding independently after the workshop. Based on the feedback questionnaire, which we sent around after the workshop, most participants felt that they are now able to do this. I also hope that the basic introduction to the programming language R was useful for them, since they can use R, even if they will not work with network analysis in the future. In addition, my impression was that the workshop participants built good rapport with each other. For example, I really appreciated how they supported each other throughout the course. Most of them knew each other because they had participated in another workshop together and I wish that they continue to maintain these relationships and the resulting research community across Nigerian institutions. For me, it was super helpful to work on the Nigeria data together with them and learn about their interpretation of the results. I also used the opportunity to get the perspective of some of them on my own project. But beyond the “academic usefulness” of the workshop for my own research, I just very much enjoyed working with the group, which was very dedicated, smart, and funny. I always liked teaching and the workshop reminded me why. What would you say to other ETH researchers who are interested in conducting a teaching stay through an ETH4D Faculty Exchange grant? I would encourage other ETH researchers to seize this opportunity to connect with researchers and institutions in the respective country and to exchange knowledge with them. I experienced it as a privilege that I could return to Nigeria after my first stay in 2021, expand my research network, and share some of the tools I learned throughout the PhD. At the same time, ETH researchers should also consider the grant from the perspective of research ethics and decolonizing academia. At least in the social sciences, there is a tendency that scholars travel to low-income countries to conduct their own research, extract knowledge, and then develop their own careers “back home.” From this perspective, grants like the ETH4D Faculty Exchange grant, but also those grants enabling South-North mobility, are critical to actively foster knowledge transfer and provide resources to strengthen the research communities in the respective country. I would further recommend collaborating with a local partner institution. If this institution can help with the logistics and design of the course – to make sure it meets the needs of the participants – such a workshop is not even that much work. I, at least, was positively surprised how easy and smooth the whole process went – thanks to the excellent work of CORN. It was also a great help that the ETH4D is very supportive and tries to make the administrative part of the process as easy as possible.

The ETH4D Teaching Stay grant offers funding for ETH researchers across all disciplines to conduct a short teaching stay in with a partner organization or institution in a low- or middle-income country. The call is open twice annually, closing on 30 March and 15 October. 

You can find out more about the opportunity here .