Prof Iacopo Vivarelli

Post:	Reader in Physics & Astronomy (Data Intensive Science Centre at the University of Sussex)
Other posts:	Professor (Experimental Particle Physics Research Group)

What is this?

Biography

Particle physics is the study of the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces that act between them. Particle colliders are machines able to accelerate particles at high energies, then collide them together. Colliders are a key instrument for the understanding of how nature works at distances much smaller than the size of an atomic nucleus.   The turn on in 2009 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) created an unprecedented opportunity to significantly deepen our understanding of fundamental physics. ATLAS is a general purpose particle detector used to study the results of collisions between LHC accelerated protons at the world’s highest centre-of-mass energy. The search of the Higgs boson and the search for new phenomena, able to explain, for example, what dark matter is made of, are the most important physics topics of the ATLAS experiment. 

Education after School 

• December 2015: Postgraduate Certificate for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (PGCertHE), University of Sussex, with Distinction.  
• July 2005: PhD in Physics, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy.  
• October 2001: Degree in Physics (equivalent to MPhys), University of Pisa, Italy.

Current and Previous Appointments

• June 2013 - current: Professor at the Department of Physics & Astronomy (Reader 2015-2018, Lecturer 2013-2015) University of Sussex.
• May 2009 - May 2013: Akademischer Rat (junior faculty position, for habilitation) with the Albert-Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg.
• January 2009 - April 2009: CERN/INFN Associate fellowship. This was a joint CERN/INFN contract. Period spent at the CERN laboratory.
• July 2005 - December 2008: Assegno di Ricerca (post-doc) at the University of Pisa. Frequent and prolonged periods spent at the CERN laboratory.

ORCID: 

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0097-123X

Role

I am a reasearcher and a teacher. Fundamental physics is my passion. Particle physics never stops to excite me.

The best thing of my job is that every day comes with different challenges, frustrations, successes. Nearly two decades in the field and I have hardly had two similar days when at work.

The focus of my research is collider physics. 

ATLAS

The ATLAS experiment is built and operated by a large international collaboration of about 3000 physicists and it is in its science exploitation phase. I am a member of this collaboration and I have hold several coordination roles:

• Co-coordinator of all ATLAS activities for the search of Supersymmetry (2015-2017)
• Co-coordinator of the analysis activities for the search of stop pair production (2012-2013)
• Co-convener of the ATLAS SUSY group background forum. Coordination of the background estimation activity for SUSY analysis in ATLAS. (2011-2012)
• Chairman of the Physics Validation (software certification for physics use. 2008-2009)
• Responsible for the re-design of the ATLAS analysis model for Run 2 (2013-2014)
• Appointed editor for several physics papers on SUSY searches in final states with missing transverse momentum and b-jets, focusing on third generation squark searches.

More informations on the ATLAS experiment can be found on its public web page. 

Calorimeter R&D

The next generation collider will likely be an electron-positron collider, rather than a proton-proton collider. Electron-positron colliders work at lower energies than proton-proton colliders, but they provide superior precision.

I am collaborating with other institutes to develop a prototype of a new device, that promises to measure the energies of particles coming out of electron-positron collisions with unprecedented precision. Such dual readout detector makes use of complementary views of the energy deposits to improve the energy resolution. If realised, such device could be one of the key tools to "put the Higgs boson under a microscope and examine it", or, in more technical words, to perform high-precision measurements of the Higgs boson couplings and width.