In the nucleus of cells, chromosomes have been discovered to self-organize into a complex spatial architecture that serves vital functional purposes as, for instance, genes have to establish specific physical contacts with their distal DNA regulators to control transcriptional activities. However, how the system self-assembles to shape the folding of our genome and its functions is only poorly...
Within the cell nucleus of eukaryotic organisms, chromosomes are organized in a complex, non-random three-dimensional (3D) spatial structure, which is intimately linked to vital functional purposes. Indeed, a correct folding allows an efficient communication between genes and their distal regulatory elements while, if altered, can cause severe diseases. Here I will discuss how Polymer Physics,...
I will describe the activity aimed at characterising AGN through their variability in preparation for next generation LSST surveys.
The purpose of this work is to understand if, among the blazars not detected by Fermi-LAT, a population of TeV emitting sources could be detected by current or future Cherenkov telescopes. We cross-matched the 5BZCAT catalog of blazars with the most recent catalogs of point-like source, to determine if the X-ray emission can be used as an effective proxy to find and characterize candidate...
I will talk about the recent discoveries on high redshift galaxies made by JWST in the last year, and what we can expect from the next rounds of observations.
The recent data by the JWST satellite identify what seems an excess of luminous objects in the early Universe. It has been proposed that this may be evidence that exotic monsters lurk in the cosmic Dark Ages.
I will show how -while such excesses seems to be consistent and real- they can not be explained by some of the most extreme versions of "dark matter supported stellar objects" that myself...
I will present a project collecting machine learning tools to extract physical parameters from the major sky surveys and predict the cosmological parameters using million to billion galaxy samples.
Nel paradigma della Relatività Generale, l'attrazione gravitazionale è un fenomeno geometrico dello spaziotempo avvertito tanto dai corpi massivi che dai campi puramente energetici, come il campo elettromagnetico. In quest'ottica, anche il concetto di peso cambia, perchè non dipende solo dalla quantità di materia ma anche dall'energia interna. Trattandosi di una teoria classica, si ritiene...
The DarkSide-20k is a 20-tonne fiducial mass dual phase Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) detector for the direct dark matter search, filled with low radioactivity Argon and equipped with customised cryogenic SiPM photosensors. The experiment will be constructed in INFN Gran Sasso underground Laboratory (LNGS), and is expected to be free of any instrumental background for an...
In this talk I will present the famous Kontsevich Formality theorem, which solves the problem of quantization for any Poisson manifolds. Poisson manifolds encodes the information of classical mechanical systems, while quantum systems are encoded by star products. Kontsevich proved that for any Poisson manifold there exists a star product by proving that we can construct a(n L-infinity)...
Oxygen, the lifeblood of all living beings, is both a blessing and a challenge for us material physicists working on the materials growth for electronics. Superconductivity, ferroelectricity, ferromagnetism, and multiferroicity—these remarkable properties of materials in oxides electronics are intrinsically linked to the presence of oxygen. In this presentation, we will explore how oxygen...
Dopo il dottorato in Fisica teorica ed un breve periodo come Post-doc, ho sperimentato gli ambienti di lavoro di una start-up, di una grande azienda e di una scuola superiore. Finché ho deciso di provare a costruire una carriera come fisico freelance.
Oggi (novembre 2024) insegno matematica e fisica in un liceo per la metà del tempo, e faccio il fisico freelance per l'altra metà.
Questo talk...
Su come ho fatto di tutto per non accettare l'invito del professor Iocco, non riuscendoci.
Alcune considerazioni sulla comunicazione della scienza, maturate nella mia esperienza personale tra scuole, festival, libri, tv e teatro.
The Former Physics Pavilions of the Mostra d’Oltremare house a unique scientific and cultural heritage, bearing witness to a period of great innovation and intellectual activity. Today, these historic spaces offer an extraordinary opportunity to become a catalyst for social and cultural development through the establishment of a Center of Excellence dedicated to innovative scientific and...
An innovative lidar system was recently made operational as part of the mobile unit for the atmospheric remote sensing of the Naples National Facility (NF) of the ACTRIS Aerosol Cloud and Trace Gases Research Infrastructure.
The lidar is a two wavelength elastic/Raman compact and transportable system, with scanning unit, specially designed to investigate the atmosphere in a very large range of...
Upon introducing an heavy quark in the perturbative regime of the QCD conformal
window we precisely determine the associated heavy meson spectrum and wave
functions in terms of the number of light flavours and mass. We then compute the
conformal Isgur-Wise function which is a central quantity in heavy quark physics.
We further determine the impact of the residual low energy confining dynamics...
The direct current Superconductive Quantum Interference Device (dc SQUID) is one of the most established applications of superconductor technology. Their often-unrivalled sensitivity to magnetic flux translates into numerous applications for SQUID sensors, such as low-temperature thermometry or current sensing for electrical metrology.
In this contribution, we present the integration of...
The Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) represents the next generation of Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes, the most effective ground-based instruments for gamma-ray detection. Compared to the current generation, CTAO introduces a significant leap in capabilities with a large number of telescopes distributed across two sites: 15 in the Northern hemisphere and 60 in the...
Optical degrees of freedom, such as those associated with spatial, spectro-temporal, or polarization features of the optical field, serve as a convenient resource for encoding information. The abundance of tools for their accurate manipulation established photonics as a versatile platform for both classical and quantum information processing tasks. Optical processors based on linear circuits,...
With the increasing precision of experimental measurements in collider physics, testing the Standard Model requires ever more accurate theoretical predictions. LINE is a software designed to contribute to this goal by addressing the numerical computation of multi-loop Feynman integrals solving differential equations via series expansion. The code is written in C to efficiently leverage...
The local ergotropy, the maximum amount of work extractable via local unitary transformations, is theoretically investigated in an out-of-equilibrium localized many-body quantum battery. In this analysis, we focus on the one-dimensional disordered XXZ Heisenberg model. Extensive simulations are conducted to model the dynamics using matrix product states and to optimise unitary transformations...
Detecting and characterizing low-surface brightness galaxies (LSBGs) and ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) is known to be challenging due to their faint surface brightness, posing a significant hurdle for traditional detection methods. Recently, artificial neural networks proven to have a powerful learning ability, which can learn the features of the object from the image and complete classification...
The FOOT (FragmentatiOn Of Target) experiment measures nuclear fragmentation cross sections in the 50-700 MeV/A energy range with about 5% uncertainty. Target nuclei (16O,12C) fragmentation induced by proton beams is studied via an inverse kinematic approach employing 16O, 12C beams impinging on graphite and polyethylene targets. Two complementary setups are used: the nuclear emulsions...
The rapid advancement of comprehensive genome mapping techniques, such as Hi-C, for investigating the three-dimensional configuration of the genome within the nucleus has uncovered complex chromatin architectures at multiple scales, including A/B compartments, topologically associating domains (TADs), and chromatin loops. These structural elements of the 3D genome are linked to crucial genomic...
The advent of quantum computers threatens to render traditional cryptographic systems, based on problems like prime factorization and discrete logarithms, obsolete. This challenge is not only technological but also fundamentally physical, as quantum computing leverages the unique properties of quantum mechanics. The scientific community is developing advanced post-quantum cryptography (PQC)...
The quasi-normal modes (QNMs) of a Morris-Thorne type wormhole (WH) are compared to the Schwarzschild black hole (BH) within General Relativity. We investigating the similarities between the two QNM spectra (numerical isospectrality) for perturbations of different spin.
How well does a WH mimic the QNM spectrum of a BH ?
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a promising hybrid quantum-classical algorithm that can solve combinatorial optimization problems.
The quantum part of the algorithm involves using parametric unitary operations on a quantum computer to prepare a trial solution state. The parametric QAOA angles are variationally optimized minimizing a cost function using classical...
A detector capable of resolving the number of photons is crucial for numerous applications, including quantum communication and quantum optics. Using a photon-number-resolving detector allows us to both determine the number of incident photons and reconstruct their distribution [1]. This capability is particularly important at telecom wavelengths, where silicon detectors are ineffective. One...
DarkSide-20k is an experiment aimed at the direct search for WIMP dark matter, currently under construction at LNGS. It employs a 50-ton (20-ton fiducial) two-phase argon time projection chamber (TPC). Among the many innovations of the DS-20k TPC is the use of newly developed, radiopure SiPM-based photon counters, produced in a dedicated facility at LNGS, NOA, and tested in the Cryogenic...
Primordial Black Holes with a mass lighter than $10^{15} \rm g$ are expected to have evaporated by now according to Hawking's semi-classical approximation for black holes evaporation.
Recent works have pointed out that quantum effects, known as “memory burden”, may slow the evaporation of black holes, potentially allowing a population of light primordial black holes (PBHs) to survive until...
Gravitomagnetic effects are some of the most peculiar predictions of General Relativity. It is known that spinning astrophysical sources drag space-time around them, a phenomenon known as frame-dragging. The Lense- Thirring effect is one of its consequences. It consists in the precession (with respect to the fixed-stars) of the rotation axis of a test-gyroscope in the gravitational field of a...
