Research

Themes


The Universe is home to many energetic phenomena that create populations of charged particles out of thermal equilibrium. Those particles then can propagate away from their sources as cosmic rays, and deposit energy throughout their parent galaxies. Thus, high-energy processes influence the interstellar medium, the process of star formation, and galaxy evolution. Charged particles are challenging to study because they are continuously deflected by magnetic fields and, by the time we catch them near the Earth, cannot be tracked back to their sources. However, energetic particles interact with matter and electromagnetic fields, creating neutral products (radio emission, sub-mm lines, gamma rays, neutrinos) that point to their creation site.
My specialty consists in the study of high-energy astrophysical phenomena and cosmic particles using gamma rays. I use gamma-ray data from a number of instruments, along with multiwavelength/multimessenger observations, to study how particles are accelerated, propagate, and interact with the interstellar medium on all scales, from individual energetic objects (e.g., supernova remnants, pulsars), to regions of massive-star formation, and up to the scales of whole galaxies. The diffuse gamma-ray glow produced by cosmic rays as they propagate through galaxies not only gives us information about these particles, but it is also a tracer of the interstellar medium complementary to observations carried out at many other wavelengths, and produces a foreground/background that we need to understand in order to study individual objects, as well as diffuse gamma rays produced by other types of processes, e.g., the extragalactic gamma-ray background and potential dark-matter signals.

Projects


Observational facilities are key to making progress in our understanding of the Universe. I am currently mainly involved in two projects.

    • The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA): the next generation ground-based gamma-ray observatory, comprising two sites in the Northern hemisphere (Canary Islands) and Southern hemisphere (Chile) to observe the whole sky from few tens of GeV to several hundreds of TeV with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. I have worked on the instrumentation for cameras designed for CTA, participated to the definition of the Science program of the CTA Consortium, and I am now involved in the development of the data analysis methods and software.
    • The Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard the  Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope:  state-of-the-art space born gamma-ray observatory, that is surveying the whole sky in the energy range from a few tens of MeV to beyond 1 TeV since 2008. The Fermi LAT has revolutionized our knowledge of the gamma-ray Universe, increasing the number of known gamma-ray emitters by more than a factor of 10, revealing diffuse gamma-ray emission in unprecedented detail, and discovering several new and unexpected phenomena. I have worked on the analysis of Fermi LAT data since before the launch, with a particular emphasis on the gamma-ray/cosmic-ray connection.
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