Tag Archives: Evento scientifico

The structure-function relationship is the basis of quantitative analysis of living organisms whose fundamental unit is a cell. Cellular structural and functional complexity is a challenge to our understanding of responses to various environmental changes affecting cells. Electrical and electromagnetic interactions with cells are particularly poorly understood. I will discuss recent experiments performed in parallel with computational modelling aimed to develop an integrated model of the cell as a bioelectric circuit. I will summarize key bio-electric properties of the cell as a whole and its major components, which will allow to reverse engineer the underlying bio-electrodynamic design principles. While much is known about the electric properties of cell membranes, explorations of the cytoskeleton, are still nebulous. Key cytoskeleton components, actin filaments and microtubules, play essential roles in cell motility, mitosis, cell differentiation, transport and signalling. Their elementary protein building blocks self-assemble into cell-spanning filaments, and are strongly affected by temperature, ionic concentrations, pH and other factors. These factors are involved in cellular structure formation and significantly affect cellular responses to electric and EM fields. My ultimate objective is to uncover an electrodynamic design blueprint for eukaryotic cells accounting for these factors, both generically and in comparison between normal and cancer cells. While cancer cells exhibit major changes in their electro-chemical properties compared to normal cells, this property is yet to be substantially exploited for therapeutic applications, although some promising advances have recently been made and I’ll discuss them in this talk. This work is intended to unveil a new paradigm …

The investigation of the strong interaction between different hadron pairs is one of the most fundamental problems in nuclear physics. The interaction of nucleons with kaons has a dominant role in the description of low-energy QCD with strangeness degrees of freedom, in a regime where chiral symmetry breaking is dominant. Theoretical models for the kaon-nucleon interaction need to take into account several physics processes that arise from the underlying strong interaction leading to the formation of resonances and bound states. The description of such interactions is crucial to describe the evolution and the properties of matter under extreme conditions. Our experimental knowledge on hadron-hadron interactions is based mostly on scattering data and lacks precision in the strangeness sector. In the study of the antikaon-nucleon interaction, the kaonic hydrogen studies delivered the most precise measurement at the interaction threshold, and recently ALICE femtoscopic measurements of the antikaon-proton correlation function provided unprecedented constraints above threshold. However in order to pin down the full isospin dependence of the antikaon-nucleon interaction, new measurements are required. To this end, two complementary approaches are being carried on at the LNF: the measurement of the kaonic deuterium X-ray lines by SIDDHARRTA-2 and new femtoscopic studies of kaon-deuteron correlations by ALICE, which will constitute a strong test for the state-of-the art theoretical models. The measurement of the kaon-deuteron correlation function could also deliver additional information on the formation time of (anti)deuterons in hadron-hadron collisions. Moreover, the femtoscopy method can be extended by using the formalism of multivariate cumulants …

The next INFN – MAC will be held in hybrid format at LNF-INFN, Via Enrico Fermi, 54 – Frascati (Italy).

The EuPRAXIA@SPARC_LAB TDR Review Committee will be held at the INFN-LNF (Frascati) on 26-27 October 2021 in a hybrid format (onsite and remotely). At the moment, a maximum of 40 people can attend onsite in the B. Touschek Auditorium. The connection will be provided by the Zoom platform. The Zoom link to join remotely will be sent by email to registered participants only. Participants in the Meeting are invited to register via web using the online registration form. REGISTRATION DEADLINE: 15 October 2021  

Massive neutrinos could be Majorana particles, identical to their own antiparticles. The only practical way of finding out if this possibility has been realised by Nature, is observing a rare nuclear process, called neutrinoless double beta decay (bb0nu). The best experiments of the field have established that the lifetime of bb0nu is longer than 10^26 years and current data suggest that at least two orders of magnitude more may be needed to observe a signal. This means  that the next generation of experiments will need exposures in the range of tens of ton year, and even more crucially, background rates approaching to zero.   In this talk I will present the NEXT program for bb0nu searches.  I will review the current status of the experiment and will describe the R&D leading to future NEXT apparatus, with target masses in the ton range, which could be operating in the second half of this decade. I will also discuss how NEXT can implement a unique signal, observing, in (delayed) coincidence, the two electrons and the Ba2+ dication produced in the decay Xe-136 -> Ba2+-136 + 2e (+ 2nu). The NEXT-BOLD project, funded with an ERC Synergy grant is developing the R&D needed to boldly explore the Majorana Landscape.   Join Zoom Meeting https://infn-it.zoom.us/j/89266806966?pwd=UlFuZ2w1SjBRSkhlSjEzdWJHaXZqQT09   Meeting ID: 892 6680 6966 Passcode: 843454  

We study special quantum field theories with additional spacetime symmetries, namely conformal symmetry and extended supersymmetry. After inserting an extended probe, represented by a Wilson loop,  we study the residual symmetry pattern and we compute correlation functions of local operators in presence of the Wilson loop. We exploit special tools of superconformal theories, such as supersymmetric localization and conformal defect analysis. and we obtain exact results for special classes of observables.   Join Zoom Meeting https://infn-it.zoom.us/j/91902460259?pwd=T0hpK0IvbmhFTElCZnVTeUw2S045Zz09 Meeting ID: 919 0246 0259 Passcode: 2bRbxK

Neutrinos, the only neutral elementary fermions, have provided us with many surprises.  Flavor oscillations reveal the non-conservation of the lepton flavor number and demonstrate that, although neutrino masses are finite, yet they are surprisingly smaller than those of other fermions (by at least six orders of magnitude!). It is then natural to ask if the mechanism providing the mass to neutrinos is the same that gives masses to the other (charged) elementary particles and if neutrinos are described by 4-component Dirac wavefunctions or, as possible for neutral particles, by 2-component Majorana ones. The hypothetical phenomenon of neutrino-less double-beta decay can probe the Majorana nature of neutrinos and the conservation of the overall lepton number.   It may also help elucidating the origins of mass in the neutrino sector. Current limits on the half-lives for neutrino-less double-beta decay are in the 1025 -1026 years range (or 1015-1016 times the age of the Universe!) making experiments rather challenging.    I will describe nEXO, an experiment using 5 tonnes of Xenon enriched to 90% in the isotope 136 in a liquid phase TPC.  The nEXO detector uses a well-proven design, deriving from that of the very successful EXO-200, the first 100 kg-scale experiment to take data.  At the same time, a number of state-of-the-art technical solutions make the nEXO instrumentation quite novel and interesting in its own right.   The nEXO scientific collaboration and construction team includes over 200 scientists and engineers from 32 institutions and nine countries.   Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/93059412136?pwd=WHZnZXpPeGwvT1AxWWVJSUNtWllEZz09 Meeting ID: …

5th European Advanced Accelerator Concepts Workshop REGISTRATION IS CLOSED The workshop will take place at LNF-INFN from the 20th to the 22nd of September 2021 in a hybrid format, followed by a EuroNNAC meeting on the 23rd of September. Under present rules most of the workshop will take place in a virtual and reduced format, allowing an expectation of maximum of 40 people to attend in-person at the LNF-INFN, in Frascati (Rome, Italy). For those participants who will be notified as “in presence”, it will be requested to show EU covid-19 green pass or covid-19 certificate at the entrance of the LNF area and/or Bruno Touschek Auditorium due to the new Italian law issued on July 22, 2021. Here some useful information about travelling to Italy: link. LNF-INFN decline all responsibility for any quarantines/isolations that may occur in the event of a positive COVID-19 case during the meeting. The focus this year will be on 18 plenary talks and a one day event on the accelerator R&D roadmap discussions ongoing in Europe and the US. The poster session and the usual parallel sessions of working groups cannot take place. The European Advanced Accelerator Concepts Workshop (EAAC2021) has the mission to discuss and foster methods of beam acceleration with gradients beyond state of the art in operational facilities. The most cost effective and compact methods for generating high energy particle beams shall be reviewed and assessed. This includes diagnostics methods, timing technology, special needs for injectors, beam matching, beam dynamics with advanced accelerators …