Research Area: FIS/01 - Fisica Sperimentale
Research activities
Trained as an experimental physicist of elementary particles, I have been a full professor at the Department of Physics since 2024. I have worked in experiments for researching CP violation (B physics at Fermilab) and for researching new physics beyond the Standard Model through the rare decay of the muon in electron-photon (MEG and MEG-II experiments at the Paul Scherrer Institut near Zurich). I contributed to developing innovative detectors (the liquid Xenon calorimeter of the MEG experiment and the drift chamber of the MEG-II experiment) together with readout and trigger electronics, as well as data analysis.
Since 2014 I have been working on Experimental Cosmology, as a way of exploring the physics of fundamental interactions at scales not accessible to accelerators. In particular, I deal with the search for experimental signals of cosmological inflation, i.e. the exponential expansion that is thought to have occurred in the very first moments of life of the universe, initiated by a mechanism entirely similar to the Higgs mechanism, but on energy scales comparable with grand unified theories (GUT).
For these experiments, in particular the LiteBIRD satellite which will be launched in the early 2030s, I am developing, together with my group and in collaboration with the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) innovative sensors and readout electronics that make use of superconducting and quantum technologies, including for example TES (superconducting transition) detectors, KIDs (kinetic inductance detectors) and SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices), which we study in laboratories using instrumentation innovative cryogenics.
I am also interested in the applications of these technologies beyond cosmology, in particular the detection of neutrinos and dark matter.
Recent publications
- A liquid hydrogen target to fully characterize the new MEG II liquid xenon calorimeter [2023]
- Analysis and study of the problems on the wires used in the MEG CDCH and the construction of the new drift chamber [2023]
- Improved muon decay simulation with MCMULE and GEANT4 [2023]
- The Cylindrical Drift Chamber of the MEG II experiment [2023]
- The measuring systems of the wire tension for the MEG II Drift Chamber by means of the resonant frequency technique [2023]