Welcome to my Webpage
I am a Ph.D. student in particle physics at the University of Milan and a member of the NNPDF collaboration in which I work as a code developer. Check the NNPDF Github page if you want to learn about the various tools used in our analyses.
With a background in theoretical physics in the field of particle physics, my research focuses on the high precision study of the internal structure of the proton using machine learning tool, like neural networks, analyzing experimental data collected at particle accelerators like LHC at CERN . This results in the extraction of the so-called parton disrtibution functions (PDFs), i.e. functions that describe the proton in terms of the distribution of its constituents (quarks and gluons). This is fundamental for the physics program of all the particle accelerators in high energy physics, like the LHC at CERN, since the PDFs enter in the computation of all theory predictions in the hadron collisions.
The two follwing pictures show (on the left) the neural network used in the analysis and (on the right) the set of datapoints used. The data comes from a variety of independent experiments like ATLAS , CMS , LHCb , HERA , SLAC and others. Both pictures are taken from the NNPDF4.0QED paper .
The following picture shows the results of the analysis, i.e. the PDFs
I am also a computer science enthusiast: during my research career I worked with a variety of programming languages, but in particular with C++ and Python. I have hands-on experience with various machine learning tools, like Keras and Tensorflow.
Check my Github page for more informations on my (public) projects.
My Research Projects
The main research projects that I worked on during my research career are the following:
Including Electrodynamics effects in PDFs determination
The main project of my Ph.D. was the inclusion of Electrodynamics effects in PDFs determination.
Usually, the PDFs are determined considering only the effects coming from the strong interaction, i.e. the so-called Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), since it is the dominant effect.
However, if one wants to achieve a precision of the order of percent in the theory predictions, then the effects coming from the electromagnetic interaction, i.e. Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), cannot be neglected. It follows that the proton’s components aquire a new member: the photon! The photon PDF is somehow special: while the other PDFs cannot be computed but must be extracted from data, the photon can be computed with an approch called LuxQED method, see arXiv:1607.04266 and arXiv:1708.01256 , with an equation that links it to the electron-proton scattering predictions.
The following picture, taken from the NNPDF4.0QED paper , shows the comparison of the photon PDFs from the most recent analysis
Developing an approximation for electron-proton scattering at third order in the strong coupling
The project I worked on during my Master Thesis was the construction of an approximation for the electron-proton scattering, the so-called deep inelastic scattering (DIS), at the third order in the expansion in the strong coupling \(\alpha_s\) (the so-called next-to-next-to-next-to leading order or in brief N\(^3\)LO) with the heavy quark mass dependence, that is not known yet.
Indeed all the quantities in particle physics are computed as a power expansion in \(\alpha_s\). So the theoretical predictions for DIS are computed as
This terms are fully known up to \(C^{(2)}\), but the very last one, i.e. \(C^{(3)}\), is not. My work was to combine various limits to construct an approximation for this unknown term.
In order to do it, I wrote the C++ code Adani , now public. The main methodology and the results are shown in my Master Thesis .
These results have also been used in the N\(^3\)LO PDFs determination by NNPDF.
Other Interests
Other than physics and coding I have other interests:
- I started playing basketball at a very young age (6 years old) with Minibasket Roma Team-up , and then I continued with Sam Basket Roma (that unfortunately no longer exists) where I played in all the youth categories and in the italian C Silver series. In March 2020 with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic I ended my basketball career. Such a huge loss for the whole italian basketball community. Check this page for more details.
- Since spring 2023 I am an amateur runner. My aim is to run at least an half-marathon, but there is still a long way to go.
- I am an amateur cook: my best disher are all the ones coming from the Roman cousine like spaghetti alla carbonara, cacio e pepe, coda alla vaccinara, but also desserts like tiramisù, panna cotta and a lot more.
Contacts
Contact me at one of these e-mails: