The European Researchers’ Night returns, Friday 29 September 2023. Researchers from the university and research institutes of Bologna are waiting for youin Piazza Lucio Dalla from 6pm onwards to spend an evening together with workshops, demonstrations, games, presentations, for adults and children.
The event program is available here: https://www.nottedeiricercatori-society.eu/la-notte The European Researchers’ Night is an initiative promoted by the European Commission involving thousands of researchers and research institutions every year in all European countries. Society riPENSAci is a CNR project, in partnership with INAF, INFN, INGV, UniBo, UniFe, CINECA, ComunicaMente and Naxta which in 2023 brings the European Researchers’ Night to Bologna, to Ferrara under the directionof the University of Ferrara, and in the other cities of Emilia Romagna that host the Campuses of the University of Bologna: Cesena, Forlì, Ravenna and Faenza, Rimini.
After a brief introduction by the President of the Italian Speleological Society, Sergio Orsini, the film ‘Beppo’ by Roberto Tronconi, director and speleologist, will be screened.
“Beppo” recounts the scientist’s life between discoveries in the field of astrophysics and speleological explorations.
The film is followed by a round table discussion with the participation of the director of the film Roberto Tronconi himself and the Vice-President of the Occhialini Foundation, Filippo Martelli.
Lorenzo Piroli, researcher in Theoretical physics at the University of Bologna and associate to the Bologna Unit Section and member of the Iniziativa Specifica “Quantum”, has won one of the prestigious ERC Starting Grant 2023, assigned by the European Research Council.
After completing his PhD at the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, Lorenzo has worked as a post-doc researcher at the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Munich and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Since May 2023, he is researchers and teacher in the theoretical group of the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Bologna and associate to INFN.
His scientific activity is carried on in the field of physics of quantum many body systems and of quantum information and computation. The main objective of the research project, for which he has obtained funds for about 1,4 million euro, is to identify new and potentially exotic effects relevant for the theoretical many body description of the present day prototypes of quantum computers. The project will focus on the theoretical study of new out-of-equilibrium phases of matter, which might be observable already in present quantum simulation platforms.
Lorenzo’s research project will last 5 years and has the secondary objective of reinforcing the collaborations that have been recently established among different groups of quantum information and quantum many body physics. It is one of the 400 research projects that has won an ERC Staring Grant (out of more than 2500 submitted) and the only one in the field of fundamental constituents of matter (PE2) allocated to an Italian institution.
Prof. Masatoshi Koshiba passed away on November 12th, 2020. He was awarded a Nobel prize in 2002. For his outstanding contribution to the study of astrophysical neutrinos and on a proposal from Prof. Giorgio Giacomelli, who shares a long-lasting bond of friendship and fruitful scientific collaboration with Prof. Koshiba, he received a Laurea ad honorem in Astronomy from our University, on June 17th 2005.
We wish to remember him with the same esteem and affection that marked his relationship with our research groups.
A rich agenda of appointments will lead to the European Researchers’ Night 2021, which will take place on 24 September 2021. Here (link) you can find the agenda of all the appointments that will directly involve the Physics and Astronomy Department of Bologna and the INFN Bologna Section and CNAF. The complete program of all the activities of “Waiting for … the European Researchers’s Night” and information about the Night can be found on the website: “http://nottedeiricercatori-society.eu/aspettando-la-notte-2021/”.
The collaboration of the CDF experiment (acronym for “Collider Detector at Fermilab”) has made known the measurement of the mass of the W boson equal to MW = 80 433.5 ± 9.4 MeV, the most accurate measurement ever made. To date, this is our strongest measure, and it manifests a discrepancy between the expected value in the Standard Model and the measured one.
The result achieved rewards the ten-year effort of an experiment to which the Italians, with the constant support of INFN, have contributed decisively, since the beginnings dating back over 40 years ago.
CDF is a historic experiment in physics of elementary particles and fundamental interactions of nature carried out at the Tevatron proton and antiproton collider at the Fermilab high-energy laboratory in Chicago.
The CDF experiment has collected data for almost twenty years, achieving countless important physics results, including the discovery in 1995 of the top quark which is the last of the six quarks envisaged by the Standard Model of elementary particles and fundamental interactions.
Another fuamental particle of the Standard Model is the W boson revealed at CERN in Geneva in 1983. It plays an important role by acting as a mediator of weak interactions and the value of its mass MW represents one of the fundamental parameters in particle physics. Measurements of its mass were carried out with increasing precision, first using experiments at the Tevatron, then at LEP at CERN, and finally at LHC at CERN.
The final step in the Standard Model validation was the observation of the Higgs boson, obtained 10 years ago from the ATLAS and CMS experiments conducted at the LHC accelerator.
The masses of the Higgs boson (MH), of the top quark (Mt) and MW are intimately correlated with each other and their precision measurement allows the Standard Model itself to be tested.
The measurement of the mass of the W carried out by the CDF experiment, described in the article published in Science, is the result of an analysis work that lasted ten years and was based on a sample of about four million candidate W events collected between 2002 and 2011. For these events the distributions of some kinematic quantities obtained from the data were studied and compared with predictions obtained from simulations obtained with reference to different possible values for MW. In this way, after having carried out careful calibrations, we finally obtained the measurement of the mass of the W boson equal to MW = 80 433.5 ± 9.4 MeV. Relative accuracy, about 1 part in 10,000, surpasses all other previous combined measurements. This precision is also comparable with the theoretical one, making it possible to directly compare measurements and predictions.
To realize the relevance of this result, it is important to compare the MW measured value together with the world average obtained for the mass of the top quark Mt (the red outline in the figure on the side) with the theoretical predictions based on the measured value for the mass of the boson of Higgs (the solid blue line). A significant discrepancy can be noted between the most recent MW and Mt measurement and the predictions of the Standard Model. This discrepancy suggests the need for improvements in the predictions of the Standard Model, or the introduction of theoretical extensions with respect to the current Standard Model.
This does not come as a complete surprise because physicists believe that the description of nature provided by this model, however accurate it may be, may be incomplete. Proof of this are the recent discoveries of neutrino oscillations and indications of the possible presence of a type of matter not yet detected in our Universe, the so-called dark matter. In conclusion, this result could be the first indication built on solid experimental foundations and very high precision measures of the existence of new physics, or physics “beyond the Standard Model”, as it is used to say.
Several professors and researchers of the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Bologna, together with colleagues from other Italian universities (Padua, Pavia, Pisa, Rome Sapienza, Siena, Trieste and Udine) and researchers from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics have taken part in the construction of the CDF detector, in the data taking, in the writing of the reconstruction and simulation programs, and in the analysis of the events collected by CDF.
There have also been a number of students, doctoral students and post-docs who have trained within our group over the years. Many of them have benefited of summer periods of stay at Fermilab within a CDF “summer student” program co-financed by INFN for advanced scientific training.
2014: last CDF collaboration meeting in Fermilab. But it wasn’t a farewell, just a goodbye.
An immense gratitude and an affectionate memory go to Prof. Franco Rimondi o who led the group of researchers of CDF-Bologna until his death.
In meno di due mesi il Ventilatore Meccanico Milano (MVM), l’innovativo dispositivo per la respirazione assistita, nato in Italia e sviluppato da un’ampia collaborazione scientifica internazionale, ha ottenuto la certificazione di emergenza (EUA, Emergency Use Authorization) della FDA Food and Drug Administration, l’ente certificatore statunitense e potrà quindi entrare nelle dotazioni degli ospedali dei Paesi che riconoscono la certificazione americana. MVM è stato appositamente ideato per essere facilmente e velocemente prodotto ovunque: è caratterizzato da un progetto ad accesso libero e un design meccanico semplice basato su componenti di facile reperibilità sul mercato, così da poter essere prodotto su larga scala, a costi contenuti e nei diversi Paesi. In Italia il progetto ha il supporto dell’INFN Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare e in particolare della Sezione di Bologna, delle Università di Milano-Bicocca, Milano Statale, Napoli Federico II, Pisa, GSSI Gran Sasso Science Institute, degli istituti STIIMA e ISTP del CNR.
Per maggiori informazioni vedere il comunicato stampa INFN, disponibile su:
The satellite lifted off from Cape Canaveral on July 1, 2023 and reached its destination orbit a few days ago at 1.5 million km from our planet capturing the first test images.
Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IG
Euclid is an ESA scientific project in which Italy partecipates through the Italian Space Agency (ASI), the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN).
The group of the INFN Division of Bologna started together with that of Padua the INFN participation in the mission in 2015.
The satellite is equipped with a 1.2 m reflecting telescope and two scientific instruments: the VISible instrument, (VIS) and the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, (NISP). They are designed to provide very sharp images of the extragalactic sky and perform near-infrared spectroscopy of millions of galaxies. Euclid’s overarching scientific goal is to reach a detailed understanding of dark matter and dark energy, invisible components that make up 95% of the composition of the universe, and to provide decisive measurements also in sectors in which INFN has always been involved, such as neutrino physics, complementary in this area to the research carried out in laboratories.
Researchers and technicians of the Bologna Section and of CNAF, coordinated by Gabriele Sirri, contributed to the integration, testing and validation of the warm electronics of the NISP instrument, to the functional tests of the flight software, to the test campaign at the LAM laboratory (Marseille), and provided support for in-flight commissioning.
The Bologna group, which includes researchers from the INFN Division, CNAF, DIFA and INAF-OASBO, is ready to exploit scientific data with the main objective of focusing on the study of the properties of neutrinos and dark energy.
The first snapshots are still early test images, taken to check the instruments and review how the spacecraft can be further tweaked and refined. These are raw, largely unprocessed images, some unwanted artefacts remain – for example the cosmic rays that shoot straight across.
The image above was acquired by the NISP instrument sensitive to near infrared frequencies (900-2000 nm) with an exposure of about 2 minutes.
From 6 to 13 July 2022, Bologna hosts, for the first time in Italy, the 41st edition of ICHEP – International Conference on High Energy Physics, the scientific reference event in particle physics for over 70 years,
in which, every two years, the most relevant results produced by the scientific community are presented about particle physics, astrophysics, cosmology and technology of accelerators and strategies and plans for the future of research in these fields are discussed.
Six days of work – with a break on Sunday – at the Bologna Congress Center, which will involve over a thousand physicists from all over the world, with more than 900 presentations in parallel sessions (from 6 to 9 July) and plenary (from 11 to 13 July): after the forced break of the health emergency, the event returns therefore inpresence, also proposing the streaming mode to allow remote participation.
