Group for Advanced Receiver Development (GARD) is an instrumentation group of Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) and has two locations: at Chalmers University Campus in Gothenburg city, and at OSO.  GARD is located in the house A of Chalmers Microtecnology Centre (MC2).  The Onsala Space Observatory is situated about 30 miles south from Gothenburg, and is the Swedish National Facility for Radio Astronomy.  The Onsala Space Observatory is part of the Department of Radio and Space Science, Chalmers University of Technology, (CTH).

Thesis Projects in GARD

Projects intended for Chalmers University students graduated from International Master of Science Programs EMAST, RAMAS or “regular” students from other programs with sufficient background

The Group for Advanced Receiver Development (GARD) is one of research groups at the Department of Radio and Space Science and Onsala Space Observatory.  GARD consists of mixture of academic and engineering staff with research focused on scientific instrumentation for millimeter, sub-millimeter and THz parts of electromagnetic spectrum with the main emphasis on application within observational radio astronomy and environmental science.  In order to achieve the best performance, GARD employs the most advanced components and techniques, which comprise cryogenically cooled mixers employing superconducting tunnel junctions and hot-electron bolometer mixers for applications in Terahertz frequencies.  GARD staff invests a lot time and efforts into developing technologies including an advanced Nb-based processing in Chalmers Clean room facility using dedicated equipment.  GARD participates in all major international instrumentation projects, such as APEX (Atacama Pathfined EXperiment) - jointly with MPIfR and European Southern Observatory, Herschel Space Observatory by European Space Agency and Atacama Large Millimeter Array (http://www.almaobservatory.org/ ) that is a project run jointly by scientists from Europe, Japan and USA.

In order to keep up with quickly developing field and introduce new THz techniques and components GARD continuously work on new technologies.

Please see details on our research, staff and the Projects at our web-site, GARD home page).

We suggest Thesis Projects on

Integrated Microwave read-out for innovative THz sensors operating at room-temperature

Study of surface of crystal substrate for deposition of superconducting films

Development of UV-microsensors for atmospheric research

Technology Development for THz Circuits

Design, Fabrication and Characterization of an Advanced Filter for 180 GHz

More topics will come

 

Important note for an applicant

Pre-requirement to be appointed for a thesis work at GARD group are:  successful candidate should have knowledge of microwaves at least at the level of Microwave course within Radio and Space Master program alternatively to have a course on microwaves from your home University (for EMAST students); taking additionally the MRTI course is extremely desirable.  We reserve our right to choose better and the best students for the thesis work, hence your successful examinations and tests do matter!  The proposed above Projects give only a general guidance; we expect that students interested in particular projects will contact us to discuss project details; we are open for your suggestions and discussions too.  Please consider that due to working space limitations we will not be able to take more than 4 students.  We would like to encourage female applicants.

This page was last modified February 19, 2010 by Victor Belitsky, belitsky(a)chalmers.se