I am an experimental particle physicist fascinated by the mystery of Dark Matter, arguably the most fundamental unsolved problem in modern physics. I currently work at INFN Sezione di Roma as Staff Researcher.

I look for Dark Matter in different ways. With the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, I try to find evidence of its production in proton-proton collisions, by looking at final states with large missing transverse momentum and visible particles. With the DarkSide experiment at Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso and with the LArNaI R&D project, I try to identify strategies for detecting the scattering of Big Bang relics, or “the Dark Matter which constitutes a large fraction of our current universe”, with argon nuclei.

Previously, I was Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University, where I started chasing Dark Matter as well as new, heavy resonances at ATLAS, and I had the privilege - as a PhD student at Sapienza Università di Roma - to discover the Higgs boson in its four-lepton decay channel and to measure its spin-parity state with multi-dimensional matrix-element techniques.

When I’m not doing physics, I act, climb and do other stuff.

ATLAS Experiment

• perspective studies for Dark Matter searches during the High-Luminosity LHC phase (2018-present)
• search for new physics in final states with jets and large missing transverse momentum (2014-present)
• search for new physics in final states with photons and large missing transverse momentum (2013-2015)
• Dark Matter interpretation of LHC search results (2013-present)
• search for heavy resonances decaying in vector bosons reconstructed with boson tagging (2015-2018)
• development of statistical tools for data analysis in diboson final states (2015-present)
• search for the Higgs boson in the four-lepton channel and measurement of its spin-parity state using a matrix-element-based technique (2011-2013)
• development of identification criteria hadronic jets (2015-present)
• commissioning of the ATLAS muon Level 2 trigger algorithms at 7 TeV (2010-2012)
• MicroMegas detectors for the New Small Wheel (2014-2015, 2018-present)

DarkSide experiment

• development of reconstruction and analysis software for the DarkSide prototype and the DS-20k experiment (2018-present)
• analysis of DarkSide-50 data (2018-present)
• development of maximum-likelihood-based shape analysis tools for ionisation-only DarkSide-50 data (2018)

LArNaI project

• R&D for low-mass WIMP searches with liquid argon and scintillating crystals