Education
Ph. D. @ University of Oxford, 2018
I began my PhD journey in January 2015 at the University of Oxford, division of Atomic and Laser Physics under the supervision of Prof. Vlatko Vedral. In 2016, St. Catherine’s College of Oxford awarded me with the Wilfrid Knapp scholarship, providing a generous contribution to my education.
My work at Oxford focused on leveraging new tools of analysis, from the emerging field of Quantum Information Science, to tackles two fundamental problems in theoretical physics. The first one is the emergence of thermal equilibrium in isolated quantum systems. The second one is the unraveling of quantum aspects of the geometry of spacetime, within the theory of Loop Quantum Gravity.
I am profundly indebted to Vlatko for allowing me to forge my own path, while being a constant source of encouragement and scientific inspiration. On that note, I am also deeply grateful to Davide Girolami, for always being there when I needed advice.
M.Sc. @ Università di Pisa, 2014
In 2014 I finished the Master in Physics at the University of Pisa, Italy. These years were as painful as wonderful. I was introduced to the sweet burden of carrying out rigorous scientific explorations and I learned about the wonderful diversity of science that the community of physicists, and scientists at large, is expressing at the dawn of the 21st century.
Erasmus & Master Thesis @ Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille 2012/13
In 2011 and 2012 I was eager to dive into the fundamental and formal aspects of Quantum Mechanics. Prof. F. Strocchi, at the Scuola Normale Superiore, introduced us to the C*-algebras formulation of Quantum Mechanics, discussed various formal aspects of Quantum Field Theory and Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking. Thus, inspired by his lectures, I asked him directions about what he deemed to be an interesting research direction, within the realm of the fundamental aspects of physics. He introduced me to Loop Quantum Gravity and Carlo Rovelli’s work As I was looking for a research topic to choose for my Master thesis, I asked him if he could supervise a project on this topic. I will never forget his answer. His words where “Great ideas are not learned. You must absorb them by osmosis”. Thus inspired, I scrambled to secure modest funding to spend a year in Marseille, where Rovelli’s group operates. There, under the supervision of Simone Speziale, I spent a year studying what Loop Quantum Gravity can say about the quantum aspects of spacetime. The scientific environment Carlo, Simone and Alejandro Perez created there was the most fertile, exciting and collaborative I have ever experienced.
I will be forever in debt to everyone there, for opening their doors and speding time talking to me about Quantum Gravity and other foundational issues in physics.
While I currently can not devote much of my time to research in Loop Quantum Gravity, I am still following the literature and trying to stay updated on the most interesting results.
Summer student @ FermiLab, 2011
Over the summer of 2011, thanks to funding from the Italian institute for nuclear physics (INF), I joined a research group at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago, for a summer project. There, under the supervision of Fabrizio Margaroli, I worked within the group that studies the properties of the Top Quark and explores various ideas to push the boundaries of the currently accepted paradigm of particle physics: the Standard Model. Broadly speaking, this research area is called Beyond-Standard-Model physics and my project focused on exploring the possibility of revealing the interaction beteween Dark Matter and ordinary matter at Tevatron, a circular particle accelerator at FermiLab.
B.Sc. @ University of Palermo, 2010
I got my Bachelor Degree in Physics from the local university of the town I was born in, the University of Palermo, Italy, in 2010. The project for the thesis focused on a topic at the fontier between Quantum Information and Statistical Mechanics: quantifying multipartite entanglement generated at thermal equilibrium.
