The INAF italian team is strongly involved in the Athena mission having the co-Pi ship of the X-IFU instrument (Luigi Piro at INAF/IAPS Roma). The High Energy section of the IAPS institute is worldwide recognized as reference community in Astrophysics.
In particular, related to X-IFU the IAPS Roma has the responsibility to provide both a Cryogenic AntiCoincidence  detector (CryoAC) to reduce the X-IFU particle background, thus increasing the instrument sensitivity, and the assessment of the expected particle background inside the Athena orbit performed by the Geant4 toolkit, which affects also the FPA design.
Further, all the management activity for the full italian participation in Athena is in IAPS. The core activity is funded by ASI (the Italian Space Agency).
In the context of the LTD detectors, historically in IAPS we dealt with both cryogenic microcalorimeters and electronics. The lab is equipped with the follwoing dry systems: 1) an Oxford dilution cryostat, 2) an ADR from vericold, 3) a pulse tube cryostat from TransMIT. Propaedeutic ancillary facilities for small electronic and mechanical integration activity are present.

The next important goal for the X-IFU instrument is 2021, in which the achievement of the TRL5 technological Readines is required by ESA for all critical subsystems, as the CryoAC which is a microcalorimeter working at 50 mK made of thin Silicon absorber sensed by hundred's of TES in parallel connected, and readout by SQUID.

In the context of the CryoAC activity, this translates into defining the basic design of the instrument once and for all, and this is structured around two main activities:
1) pre-EM (pre-Engineering Model) having the form of flight one, but only one of the 4 provided channels is instrumented
2) A structural model needed to test the pre-EM sample in a representative environment (eg, vibration test)

The post-doc we are looking for will follow all the phases of these activities (design, physical modeling of the detector, test) interfacing with the Italian team (INAF, Genova Univ., CNR/IFN Roma) and Space company (Thales, OHB), and foreign partners (SRON-NL, CNES-FR).
The requested skills linked to modeling, testing, etc... are 1) cryogenic environment, 2) low-temperature detectors

Depending on the skill/quality of the post-doc, for an "INAF post-doc grant" the gross yearly salary is in between ~ 28 kEuro and ~ 32 kEuro, and the related net salary in between ~ 24 kEuro and ~ 28 kEuro. The salary is monthly supplied, for a total of 12 monthly installments.
 

In the competition notice, that we are planning to send out in September, we can allocate the position for only 1 year due to administrative rules. As usual, renewals are possible depending on the quality of the post-doc work and funding availability (standard formula reported in the competition notice).