Dashboard – CERN Zone

My pronouns are:

he/him
I'm a member of team Beam Team
My Work:

I study how protons tend to misbehave inside large particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider.
Read more

Inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), protons are expected to move in a circular orbit, perfectly sorted and grouped in a series of “bunches”. These bunches of protons will then be maneuvered by us physicists by means of magnets and electric fields so that we can make them collide together at high energies!

Unfortunately, inside these bunches, not all protons behave like they should, and consequently we end up with some of them spreading around, outside the “core” of the bunches, creating what we call a “beam tail”, or also “beam halo”.

This high-energy beam halo is dangerous for the LHC! As rouge protons are highly energetic, they can damage the most fragile components of the machine!

To solve this issue, we capture these rogue protons in safe areas of the LHC by means of collimators, big blocks of robust material placed very close together. However, it is still not completely clear what are the exact mechanisms that make this fractions of protons misbehave, nor it is possible to predict how many protons will misbehave in different scenarios.

My job is to study and test mathematical models and simulations, as well as experimental data, to better understand the rate at which protons tend to misbehave, become chaotic, and create this dangerous beam halo.
My work before CERN:

I studied Applied Physics at the University of Bologna, in Italy.

I had my first experience at CERN in 2018 with a Summer Student internship.

From there, the topics tackled at CERN during the internship became my Master Thesis, my PhD project, and my current Postdoctoral research.

Candidate CV questions (extra)

Job title:

Postdoctoral researcher – Project Associate at CERN
Employer:

The University of Manchester + CERN

My Interview
- How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
  
  Agitated Accelerator Physicist
  
  What did you want to be after you left school?
  
  My role model and job ambition has always been Gyro Gearloose the inventor!
  
  Were you ever in trouble at school?
  
  Only when I was "optimizing away" too much time from standard courses in favor of extracurricular activities and topics...
  
  If you weren't doing this job, what would you choose instead?
  
  I would see myself in a software/hardware research&development project. Possibly in the field of High Performance Computing or climate data analysis
  
  What's your favourite food?
  
  It was carbonara, but after trying the real ramen in Japan... I changed my mind
  
  If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
  
  a Star-Trek-tier starship, a giant robot industry and a 24/7 portal connected to a ramen bar in Japan.
  
  Tell us a joke.
  
  A farmer goes to a theoretical physicist. "My chicken lays no eggs anymore, can you help me?". After months of hard work, the theoretical physicist comes back and says "I have a solution! But to make it work, the chicken needs to be perfectly spherical and suspended in a vacuum chamber."