M/F Researcher - Instrumentation and adaptive optics

Organisation/Company CNRS Department Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille Research Field Astronomy Researcher Profile Recognised Researcher (R2) Application Deadline 27 Mar 2026 - 23:59 (UTC) Country France Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 35 Offer Starting Date 1 Jul 2026 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Not funded by a EU programme Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No

Offer Description

As a member of the LAM's Research and Development group, your mission will be to participate in instrumental developments in Adaptive Optics (AO), with a view to increasing the maturity of components and concepts that will equip the future European Extremely Large Telescope. You will be involved in the CASSIOPEE project, which brings together 2 academic players (LAM and ONERA) and 2 industrial partners (ALPAO and FLI), to implement an innovative AO system based on state-of-the-art components developed as part of the project.

1. Perform a comprehensive study of the adaptive optics systems used in exoplanet astronomy, their actual performance, and identify the main causes limiting this performance. This will involve descending from the high level requirements defined by the astrophysical objective to an error budget distributed over the main elements of the AO system.
2. Define the technical and functional specifications of the key technological components, i.e. the deformable mirror and the high-speed camera. In particular, these specifications define the spatial and temporal performance of the mirror, as well as the quantum efficiency, noise, dark current, latency, and readout speed of the cameras.
3. Define, design and implement the test tools required for system validation of key components.
4. Integrate the FLI camera and ALPAO mirror into a complete AO loop on a laboratory test bench. This full laboratory validation of the AO loop will demonstrate the performance gains achieved by the new components.

Adaptive Optics (AO) has been in use for over 30 years, and uses a mirror deformed by actuators controlled in real time (~ms) to correct the optical beam. The motors are controlled from measurements made by a wave surface analyzer (WSA) powered by the fastest and most sensitive cameras possible. This is the scope of the CASSIOPEE project. In this context, the development of new components proposed by FLI and ALPAO will make it possible to tackle both the problem of speed, and that of spatial scaling in anticipation of the ELT.

• Skills in optics, instrumentation, programming (Python).
• Teamwork in an international environment.
• Doctorate in astronomy, astrophysics, instrumentation, optics, physics.