My research mainly revolves around neutrinos in astrophysics and cosmology, as well as multi-messenger astrophysics. Below, I provide a glimpse on my work.

Neutrinos

I am fascinated by neutrinos!  These puzzling elementary particles vastly outnumber all other particles in our universe, except photons. Neutrinos interact very weakly. Three distinct families or “flavors” of neutrinos exist and they oscillate (convert) into each other by flavor mixing.

Spanning an incredibly large energy range, neutrinos are copiously produced in a variety of astrophysical environments, ranging from  stars like the Sun to the most extreme astrophysical transients like core-collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers. Many cosmic accelerators, such as gamma-ray bursts or active galactic nuclei, should also produce neutrinos. Owing to their feeble interactions, neutrinos  have the extraordinary ability to escape, almost unimpeded, from cosmic sources and carry  information on sites not otherwise accessible. If you are curious to know more about neutrinos and their sources, check our review paper (Vitagliano, Tamborra, Raffelt, 2020).

Core-collapse supernovae

Core-collapse supernovae (SNe) are spectacular explosions of stars at least eight times heavier than the Sun at their end of their lives. The collapse of massive stars gives birth to neutron stars and black holes. According to the delayed neutrino-driven explosion mechanism, neutrinos provide new energy to the stalled shock wave to trigger the SN explosion. The most recent SN simulations in 3D suggest that neutrinos and gravitational waves carry experimentally detectable imprints of the SN physics. Neutrinos also drive the LESA hydrodynamical instability. LESA consists of an astonishingly large asymmetric emission of electron neutrinos with respect to electron antineutrinos with possible major implications for  flavor conversions and nucleosynthesis. Moreover, neutrinos and gravitational waves may be the only detectable probes of black hole forming stellar collapses.

A SN explodes somewhere in the Universe every second. The detection of the cumulative flux of neutrinos from all SNe, the so-called Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background (DSNB), is now within reach. The DSNB will allow to constrain properties of the SN population, such as the fraction of black-hole forming collapses and the local supernova rate. If you are curious to learn more about the role of neutrinos in SNe, check our review paper on the topic (Mirizzi, Tamborra et al., 2016).

NEUtrino quantum kinetics

Supernovae as well as compact binary mergers are neutrino-dense environments. Despite the neutrino weakly interacting nature, the forward scattering of neutrinos with each other is not negligible and is responsible for coupling the flavor evolution of neutrinos with different momenta in a non-linear fashion. Recent developments concern the possibility that fast neutrino conversion occurs in the core of compact astrophysical sources, even before neutrinos decouple from matter (see Tamborra & Shalgar, 2020 for a review on the topic). If this conjecture is confirmed, the SN explosion mechanism, the merger disk physics, as well as the synthesis of the heavy elements can be dramatically affected.

Compact Binary Mergers

The massive neutron star (NS) or black hole (BH) accretion disk resulting from NS–NS or NS–BH mergers is dense in neutrinos, similarly to SNe. In compact binary merger remnants, the flux density of electron antineutrinos is larger than the one of electron neutrinos, differently from SNe. As a consequence of neutrino flavor conversion, an enhancement of the lanthanide mass fraction is expected. Our findings hint towards a potentially relevant role of neutrino physics for the modeling of the kilonova lightcurves and the cooling of the accretion disk.

Particle Acceleration & Cosmic Accelerators

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a giant neutrino telescope deployed deep in the Antartic ice, routinely detects  cosmic neutrinos with PeV energy, the highest energy ever observed. We do not know yet the origin of these neutrinos, although it is clear that they are generated from cosmic accelerators out of our Galaxy.

We model the production of neutrinos and photons at different wavelengths in a range of cosmic accelerators, such as star-forming galaxies, galaxy clusters, supernovae,  gamma-ray bursts, and fast blue optical transients. Intriguingly, we are already able to constrain the physics of these mysterious sources contrasting multi-messenger data with theoretical models.

Physics Beyond the Standard Model in Astrophysical Sources

Neutrinos of astrophysical origin provide a fascinating window into Physics Beyond the Standard Model. For example, if neutrinos convert in keV-mass sterile neutrinos in the SN core, a non-negligible lepton asymmetry generates with possibly major implications on the SN physics. At the same time, a self-consistent treatment of the production of keV-sterile neutrinos in the SN environment leads to very different bounds on the mass-mixing of these particles. Similar conclusions hold for light sterile neutrinos and other scenarios involving New Physics. The high-energy neutrinos observed by the IceCube Observatory can also carry observable imprints of New Physics occurring within the source or during propagation to Earth. Hence, astrophysical neutrino data already allow to place stringent independent bounds on New Physics.

Neutrino Cosmology

The Early Universe is dense in neutrinos. Neutrinos are usually assumed to be fully thermalized at the BBN epoch. However, this assumption may be modified (with a non-negligible impact on the observables) because of non-standard physics affecting the neutrino sector and flavor conversion.  A sophisticated modeling of the neutrino propagation in the Early Universe is still missing given our superficial understanding of neutrino flavor conversion in dense media, we work to asses the impact of neutrino physics on the cosmological observables.