TIFPA staff keeps growing

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Sep 5, 2017/ Off Comments / in Announcement / by

A new researcher, Francesco Nozzoli, joined TIFPA permanent staff on 1 September 2017. Francesco is one of the 58 winners of the national selection for experimental particle physics researchers recently carried out by INFN. Here is a short biographical note and research statement from Francesco.

Since 2001 I am involved in Dark Matter search, nuclear Physics and Astroparticle Physics.
The subject of my master degree in Physics was the search for Solar Axions with a large array of NaI(Tl) scintillators in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory of INFN.
I got a Ph.D. in Physics, supervised by Prof. R. Bernabei with a focus on the construction and data analysis of the DAMA/LIBRA experiment for Dark Matter search. From 2005 to 2010 I was a postdoc at Rome University “Tor Vergata” where I was involved in the experimental activities searching for double beta decay and rare nuclear decays with various set-up at the INFN-LNGS laboratory.
In 2011 I joined the AMS-02 collaboration as part of the Roma group in ASI-ASDC (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana Science Data Center).
I worked to the detector calibration with a new software for Anticoincidence signal reconstruction and to the Silicon Tracker alignment.
For the AMS science analysis I developed multivariate techniques allowing a data driven measurement of Antiproton fraction, positron fraction and electron flux, considered the “golden” channels for the indirect detection of Dark Matter in space.
In 2016 I got one of the 58 experimental researcher positions of INFN and I chose to join TIFPA.
I will collaborate with the TIFPA AMS-02 group that has already developed the deuterium flux measurement for AMS-02 and our first goal will be the challenging search of Anti-deuterium (just few events are expected over the 100 billion collected by AMS).
An excess of low energy Anti-deuterium would be a very clean smoking-gun for Dark Matter annihilation in the galaxy.
Besides AMS, my aim is to develop new detectors and test new ideas for the search of Dark Matter in space and in laboratory, therefore I will profit of the existing expertise in TIFPA and University of Trento in the development of sensitive devices for radiation and light detection.