Affiliation: Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, AT
Keywords: Electron-positron collisions, Low mass dark matter, New forces, Violation of symmetry law, Lepton flavor violation, Lepton flavor universality violation
Full profile:
I am a tenure track junior group leader at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. Originally from Palermo, I have studied astronomy at the University of Bologna (Bsc, 2008), experimental nuclear physics at the University of Groningen (MSc, 2011), and particle physics at the Queen Mary University London (PhD, 2014). After a research fellowship at the DESY as a postdoc (Hamburg 2014-2017) I finally moved to Vienna in 2017, initially as a postdoc. Since 2018 I am leading a team working on dark matter searches at Belle II thanks to successful third-party funding acquisition (FWF P31361 – Searches for dark matter and dark forces at Belle II). More recently an ERC starting grant ( StG 947006 InterLeptons: A search for new physics at Belle II using leptons) has allowed me to introduce a new research line in Austria, in terms of high energy physics, which deals with the search of new physics phenomena analyzing collision data of the Belle II experiment containing leptons. This of course extend and complement my previous research activities. Since 2018 I am the convener of the dark sector physics group of the Belle experiment and I am also one of the coordinators of JENNIFER2 (MSCA-RISE project funded by EU under grant n.822070) task 1.4 about Dark Sector searches at Belle 2. In 2021, I was nominated and appointed as one of the Austrian delegates of the Early Career Researcher Panel (ECR) of European Committee on Future Accelerator (ECFA) and was elected member of the plenary group.
The main focus of my research is the search for new physics phenomena in electron-positron collisions at the Belle II detector of the Super-KEKB collider. These searches for new physics are done in the context of dark sector, low mass dark matter, new forces, violation of symmetry law, lepton flavor violation, lepton flavor universality violation. These searches can be done by following two different approaches: either by directly searching for new particles or by looking for small deviations from the theoretical predictions in high precision measurements. I follow both approaches and in order to boost the sensitivity and the potential of all these searches I use machine and deep learning techniques such as, but not limited to, deep neural networks.