Premio Minerva a Claudio Quaranta
The prize "Premio Minerva" for Scientific Research, IV edition, of the Fondazione Roma Sapienza (https://www.fondazionesapienza.uniroma1.it/node/904) has been awarded to Dr. Claudio Quaranta. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics during the XXXIV cycle with a thesis in the CMS Rome group, focusing on searches for new physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva. This acknowledgment is awarded to Sapienza's doctoral students and Ph.D. graduates whose studies significantly contribute to scientific progress in their respective fields.
The direct search for new elementary particles (resonances) represents one of the major challenges in fundamental physics. New resonances can be produced in collisions between protons at extremely high energies, thousands of billions times the energy of a visible light photon, as those carried out at the LHC. Claudio's Ph.D. thesis led to the publication of an article in the prestigious journal Physics Letters B [1].
Claudio is currently "assegnista di ricerca" (postdoc) at the Department of Physics in Sapienza and he is involved in the upgrade of the CMS experiment for the high-luminosity phase of the LHC. A new detector (Barrel Timing Layer), made of scintillating LYSO crystals, will be built to measure the time of flight of charged particles with a time resolution of about 30-60 picoseconds. One of the activities involves the characterization of the LYSO crystals [2], a process carried out at the CMS laboratory in the new Segrè building.
References
[1] “Search for high-mass resonances decaying to a jet and a Lorentz-boosted resonance in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s)=13 TeV”
CMS Collaboration
Phys. Lett. B 832 (2022) 137263
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02140
[2] “Comparative characterization study of LYSO:Ce crystals for timing applications”
CMS Rome Group et al.
JINST 17 (2022) P08028
https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14890