The Physics of Supernova Neutrinos.

My PhD project is tied to the physics of supernova neutrinos. Specifically, in the case of a Type-II
core collapse supernova explosion, 99% of the total amount of energy is released in the form of
neutrinos, the smallest subatomic fundamental particles known to date. By detecting these on Earth
from future supernova bursts, one can extract information about the explosion mechanism of the
star and unknown features of neutrinos, such as unanswered questions about their mass. I work on
two particle physics experiments to achieve this and study their properties: the DarkSide-20k
detector in Assergi, Italy is currently being built, and could be used to detect supernova neutrinos in
the next explosion; my work focuses on understanding how many interactions would be detected
between the incoming neutrinos, and the detector's active material, liquid argon (LAr). In the
meantime, until the next explosion, I will be working on the SBND (Short Baseline Near Detector)
experiment at Fermilab, U.S. to measure the cross section of low energy neutrinos (as are those
from a supernova, compared to other neutrino sources) from a constant neutrino beam pointed at the
detector, whose active material is also LAr; this is a novel measurement that has not been attempted
before for "low energy" neutrinos. This important quantity, the cross section, essentially describes
the probability of an interaction to happen between the neutrino and an argon atom, and could prove
very important for future detections of supernova neutrinos.