Profile
Hello, and welcome to my website! My name is Federico Battisti, I am a graduate student in particle physics, specializing in neutrino accelerator physics. I received my bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Bologna between 2014 and 2020, where I was actively involved in the ANTARES and DUNE experiments. As part of my master's project, I studied the beam monitoring capabilities of SAND, one of the three DUNE near detectors, and I participated in the development of its simulation software. In 2019 I joined the SBN collaboration at Fermilab as a summer student, working on machine-learning based cosmic ray tagging for the ICARUS and SBND detectors.
I am currently pursuing my DPhil at Oxford under the supervision of professors Xianguo Lu and Farrukh Azfar. My research focuses on evaluating and enhancing the capabilities of the ND-GAr DUNE Near Detector, a novel high pressure gas Argon-based TPC. The essential goal of ND-GAr will be to act as a spectrometer for muons coming from interactions in the liquid Argon TPC near detector (ND-LAr), while also providing it's own sample of neutrino interactions in a relatively low-density environment. Thanks to its unique characteristics, ND-GAr will be an ideal laboratory for the study of neutrino interactions and especially of nuclear effects.
It has been proposed that a TPC detector, such as ND-GAr, would offer an ideal environment to apply Transverse Kinematic Imbalance (TKI) techniques to separate a sample of neutrino on hydrogen interactions, out of the main Argon sample (Hamacher-Baumann, Lu and Martìn-Albo and originally in Lu et al.). Such an interaction sample, would be completely devoid of nuclear effects, making it extremely useful in disentangling the associated systematic uncertainties. The main physics goal of my thesis is to evaluate as accurately as possible how feasible the application of this technique is and to explore different gas mixture options that might enhance its scope.
To correctly evaluate ND-GAr's capabilities, one of my main efforts has been to enhance the detector's tracking software. In collaboration with Dr. Marian Ivanov from the ALICE collaboration, whose TPC design was the basis for ND-GAr's, I developed a state of the art Extended Kalman Filter algorithm, designed to be used by both experiments. As a preparatory study I also created a separate Kalman Filter for ND-GAr-Lite, a proposed ND-GAr substitute for DUNE's Phase I. Both algorithms have been thoroughly tested and show significant performance improvements.
Conferences and Talks
- ICHEP 2022 BOLOGNA - 07/07/2022
Talk Title: "The DUNE Near Detector"
Talk: https://agenda.infn.it/event/28874/contributions/169662/
Proceedings: HTTPS://INSPIREHEP.NET/LITERATURE/2619507 - APS APRIL MEETING 2021- 17/04/2021
Talk Title: Potential of studying neutrino interactions in the DUNE high-pressure gas time projection chamber via transverse kinematic imbalance
Talk: https://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR21/Session/L14.3 - XIX INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON NEUTRINO TELESCOPES- 26/02/2021
Talk Title: "Physics potential with the DUNE ND-GAr detector"
Talk: https://agenda.infn.it/event/24250/contributions/130002/