Research Interests

In general, my research focuses on numerical simulations of the theory of the strong interactions among gluons and quarks, which is responsible for confining quarks and gluons inside hadrons, and for binding protons and neutrons inside nuclei. In particular, one of my researches focuses on the hadron structure and the determination of the nucleon matrix elements and transition matrix elements such as the nucleon to nucleon-pion and nucleon to delta matrix elements.
Their precise determination is needed for future neutrino oscillation experiments like DUNE at Fermilab, which might potentially answer fundamental questions about our Universe like

What is the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry?
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 813942 (ITN EuroPLEx).

This research received two awards:

The dissertation prize of the faculty of physics at the University of Regensburg for the best PhD research;

The Bavarian Culture Prize for the best scientific research of the University of Regensburg. Press releases are available for example on Mittelbayerische, Bayernwerk, University of Regensburg, and tvaktuell.

My other main research concerns numerical advances to reduce the statistical errors of observables computed with Monte Carlo simulations. In particular, together with my collaborators at DESY, Wuppertal and Dublin, we adopt the so-called multilevel technique to reduce the statistical errors of gluonic and mesonic observables. These techniques are necessary due to the challenging signal-to-noise ratio that prevents the study of such observables at large time using standard methods. This research addresses another fundamental question of particle physics, which is the phenomenon of confinement and the mass gap generation in QCD and Yang-Mills theories. This problem belongs to the Millenium Problems and the CLAY Mathematics Institute would reward $1,000,000 to prove rigorously that such confined particles comprised of only gluons exist. Although numerical simulations cannot prove rigorously their existence, they can provide an empirical evidence of their formation and certainly shed more light on its understanding.

This project is supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) research unit FOR5269 "Future methods for studying confined gluons in QCD".

Outreach Activities

As the chairperson of the outreach team of the MSCA European network EuroPLEx, I have promoted outreach activities like:

divulgative posts in our personal blog "QuarkBits" , in collaboration with Investigación y Ciencia. Two posts written by the fellows were published as a cover story in the main journal;

"International Master Classes hands on Particle Physics" in 2021, where several EuroPLEx fellows participated;

"EuroPLEx Fellow Exhibition" , a poster made by the fellows for the public audience;

"Ask Us Anything!" , where the fellows answered to many questions raised on the internet;

A YouTube video in collaboration with Sissa Medialab: Scientists: How to become one

A live stream public lecture by Lewis Tunstall on "How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing The Way We Do Science", as part of the program of the EuroPLEx final conference.

For more information about any of these activities, you can visit the EuroPLEx webpage. You can find our activities also on the FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube channels, which were administrated by myself. In the YouTube channel, we stored interesting lattice gauge theory lectures, as well as technical and public talks.