new researcher joins TIFPA staff

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May 9, 2017/ Off Comments / in Announcement / by

As of 2 May 2017, TIFPA permanent staff includes a new researcher, Alessandro Lovato. Alessandro is one of the 15 winners of the national selection for theoretical particle physics researchers recently carried out by INFN. Here is a short biographical note and research statement from Alessandro.

 

I received my bachelor and master degree in Physics from the “Sapienza” University, in Rome. I then moved to Trieste, where I got a Ph.D. in Astroparticle Physics from SISSA. My Thesis work, supervised by Professors S. Fantoni and O. Benhar, was focused on studying how realistic nuclear interactions determine the structure and the cooling of neutron stars.
In 2012 I crossed the Atlantic for a postdoctoral position at Argonne National Laboratory. In collaboration with S. Pieper and R. Wiringa, I developed nuclear Quantum Monte Carlo techniques to understand how electrons and neutrinos interact with nuclei. This is relevant for the analysis of neutrino-oscillation experiments. At the end of the postdoc I was promoted staff member in the Theory group of Argonne National Laboratory.
At the end of 2016 I got one of the fifteen full time theoretical researcher positions recently opened by INFN and I decided to join TIPFA. I will primarily collaborate with the nuclear theory group at TIFPA and the University of Trento, which possesses a unique expertise in nuclear theory and quantum Monte Carlo methods. Our goal is to describe atomic nuclei, fascinating many-body system of self-bound fermions, starting from nuclear potentials well-grounded in Quantum Chromodynamics, the underlying theory of strong interactions. Besides its intrinsic interest, this research endeavour impacts astrophysics and neutrino physics. For instance, the results of our calculations could serve as inputs for neutrino-less double-beta decay and neutrino-oscillation experiments.