Research Area: PHYS-01/A - Fisica Sperimentale delle Interazioni Fondamentali e Applicazioni
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 Characterization Procedure for Large Area Spiderweb TES [2024]
- A liquid hydrogen target for the calibration of the MEG-II LXe calorimeter [2024]
- A search for μ+→e+γ with the first dataset of the MEG II experiment [2024]
- LiteBIRD science goals and forecasts. A case study of the origin of primordial gravitational waves using large-scale CMB polarization [2024]
- LiteBIRD science goals and forecasts: a full-sky measurement of gravitational lensing of the CMB [2024]
Courses
- FISICA GENERALE I (Cod. 011BB) CdS ICE-L INGEGNERIA CIVILE AMBIENTALE E EDILE (Registro)
- FUNDAMENTAL INTERACTIONS / INTERAZIONI FONDAMENTALI (Cod. 305BB) CdS WFI-LM FISICA (Registro)
- INSTRUMENTATION FOR FUNDAMENTAL INTERACTIONS PHYSICS (Cod. 380BB) CdS WFI-LM FISICA (Registro)
- QUANTUM TECHNOLOGIES FOR FUNDAMENTAL INTERACTION PHYSICS (Cod. 0007B) CdS WFI-LM FISICA (Registro)