I have been working at CERN as Marie Curie fellow in the FLUKA development team while doing my Ph.D. at “Roma Tre” University.

In that period I worked on the benchmark and improvement of FLUKA, mainly on the Carbon-ion fragmentation models in the energy range relevant for hadrontherapy. Within this context, I contributed to the implementation of the emission of α particle in the pre- equilibrium stage and to the implementation of the exchange of quadrupole virtual photons between hadrons and nuclei in PEANUT, the model used in Fluka to handle the interactions between hadrons and nuclei below 20 TeV.

To benchmark the models in this energy range I analyzed the data and developed the Monte Carlo simulation of an experiment performed at the iThemba laboratories (Cape Town, South Africa) that measured the 12C fragmentation.

With the aim of improving the FLUKA performances for medical applications, mainly to speeding it up for expanded online capabilities, I also worked on applying different biasing techniques (namely: biasing the emission of secondaries after the interaction, biasing the interaction cross section, producing replicas for each secondary particle produced in the interaction) for the simulation of PET and SPECT for hadrontherapy monitoring and I implemented a new pseudo-random number generator for FLUKA in CUDA to exploit the benefits of parallel computing on General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPU).

Ph.D. thesis