Tag Archives: Evento scientifico

Speaker: Cristina Lazzeroni (University of Birmingham) The main aim of the proposed KOTO II experiment at JPARC is the measurement of the ultra-rare decay KL to pi0 nu nu. This decay is heavily suppressed and its branching is very well predicted by the SM (3x 10-11 with about 2% uncertainty), thereby exhibiting an exceptional sensitivity to new physics. The design includes a new beamline with a 5-degree extraction angle, and a new detector with a 12-meter-long signal decay region and a 3-meter diameter calorimeter. A discovery of the KL to pi0 nu nu decay with 5σ significance is achievable for the SM value of the branching ratio. The design, expected performance, and current status of the KOTO II experiment will be presented.

Speaker: Alfredo Stanzione (La Sapienza Univ., Roma) An interesting feature of a cosmological phase transition can be a stage of exponential expansion (supercooling). The modified expansion history and the entropy injection at reheating, can affect the final energy fraction of dark matter. In this paper, we revisit the calculation of the freeze-out and freeze-in dynamics, showing additional effects on top of the standard dilution factor if the dark matter production is completed during the supercooling stage. We show for the first time how these effects can be particularly interesting for direct detection, as the parameter space for WIMP-like candidates shifts from excluded to allowed regions, and freeze-in candidates get closer to experimental reach. A phenomenological motivation to consider supercooling is the associated gravitational wave background. The implications of a finite-duration reheating stage, when the equation of state is close to matter-domination, are a peculiar low-frequency spectrum, and its shift to lower frequencies. These effects are a complementary test of the dynamics that we study for dark matter production, and remarkably can link direct detection of dark matter and gravitational wave astronomy.

The Theoretical Phenomenology Visiting Institute@LNF will host a two-day workshop titled ‘The Semileptonic B Frontier: LHC, B-factories, Lattice QCD & the Hunt for Precision’ from February” 16 to 18, 2026, as part of its activities scheduled for February 16–20. The aim of the workshop is to bring together theorists and experimentalists working on various aspects of semileptonic b-hadron decays for both charged and neutral flavour changing current processes. Topics will include recent developments, open questions, and future directions, including novel lattice approaches for inclusive B decays, CKM determinations, hadronic form factors, and potential signals of New Physics. Participants will review the latest B-physics experimental results and the theoretical inputs, will discuss new observables and tools to enhance the future analyses. The aim of the workshop is to foster the collaboration across different communities, to improve the understanding of experimental systematic uncertainties and theoretical calculations in this crucial area of flavor physics.

Speaker: Alessandro Paoloni (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) JUNO is an experiment located in the GuangDong province of People’s Republic of China and dedicated to the measurement of the neutrino mass hierarchy through the detection of antineutrinos produced by two nuclear power plants. The experiment is based on 20 kton of liquid scintillator read out by 17596 20″ photomultipliers and 25587 3″ photomultipliers. JUNO mass is one order of magnitude higher than previous experiments on solar neutrinos (Borexino) and reactor antineutrinos (KamLAND). The unprecedented mass posed previously unknown complexities in the design and the realization of the experiment, which finally started data taking during August 2025. In the seminar the experiment will be described and its performances reported. Given the optimal baseline and the large mass of the experiment, two months of data taking have been sufficient for the best up-to-date measurement of the solar neutrino oscillation parameters, entering the era of high precision in neutrino physics.

Speaker: Emanuele Rosi The detection of gravitational waves (GW) after several decades from their formulation opened a new window to observe the universe. The new generation of GW detectors is expected to span a large parameter space, requiring theoretical physicist to develop different approaches to face the two body problem in General Relativity, each of them based on some perturbative expansion, e.g. Post Newtonian, Post Minkowskian (PM), Self Force. Among these, Effective Field Theories (EFTs) and quantum amplitudes are used together to extract scattering observables which also have a meaningful classical limit, both in the PM and Self Force frameworks. We analyse the high energy (Regge) regime of spinless two body scattering within this approach, by the prospect of isolating universal effects and to give insights on the resummation of the PM observables at higher orders, made possible by the simplicity of the calculations in the Regge limit. A sequence of classical Feynman diagrams is recognised to contribute to the leading power and leading log(s/t) in the high energy expansion. We compute them up to four loops (5PM) and use analyticity properties of the S Matrix to maximise the information that we can extract at any PM order.

Alessandro Pilloni (UniME & INFN CT) In the last 20 years, the discoveries of tenths of exotic candidates has challenged the simplistic quark model predictions, most notably in the charmonium sector. While no consensus on their nature has been reached in the community, it is time to have a critical review of our understanding of the sector, to see what developments can be expected in the near future. I will review the most relevant experimental observations of the last few years, and discuss the theoretical and phenomenological tools that will help us to move forward in understanding this complicate sector of QCD.

Speaker: Marco Scodeggio (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) Since 2009, the BESIII experiment at the BEPCII lepton collider has played a central role in hadron spectroscopy, in measurements of charmed-hadron decay properties, and in precision QCD studies at the interface between the perturbative and non-perturbative regimes. Recently, an extensive upgrade program has been completed: the accelerator luminosity in the high center of mass energy region has been increased by a factor of three, and the innermost tracking system has been replaced by the new CGEM-IT, an inner tracker based on cylindrical gas electron multiplier (GEM) technology, originally developed for the KLOE-2 experiment at LNF. In this seminar, the current status of the BESIII experiment will be presented, highlighting some recent physics results and discussing the status of the CGEM-IT detector.

Speaker: Catalina Oana Curceanu (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) The theory of strong interactions — Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) — still lacks crucial experimental input in the low-energy regime, to understand how the transition from quarks and gluons to hadrons occurs. Among the most sensitive probes of this domain are kaonic atoms, in which a negatively charged kaon replaces an electron and orbits the nucleus. The energy-level shifts and widths of such exotic systems provide direct information on the kaon–nucleon and kaon nucleus interactions, key ingredients for understanding hadronic matter and the physics of dense astrophysical objects such as neutron stars. At the DAΦNE collider in Frascati, the SIDDHARTA and SIDDHARTA-2 collaborations have pioneered a new generation of precision measurements by combining DAΦNE’s unique low-energy kaon beams with state-of-the-art Silicon Drift Detectors (SDDs). After achieving the most precise data on kaonic hydrogen and other light systems, we have now finalized the first measurement of kaonic deuterium, a long-sought milestone, and have opened the path to QED tests with exotic atoms. In this seminar, I will introduce the physics of kaonic atoms, present our most recent results, and outline future perspectives. Experiments at DAΦNE offer a unique opportunity worldwide to finally unveil the secrets of QCD and QED in the strangeness sector and to deepen our understanding of the role of strange matter, up to the stars.  

Speaker: Gael Finauri (TUM) In this talk I will review recent progress in the inclusive extraction of Vcb in the Standard Model through global fits to kinematic moments of the differential distribution. I will briefly discuss the theoretical framework of the calculation as well as the phenomenological implications. Furthermore I will present a recent work in the inclusion of New Physics effects in the global fit, constraining the available parameter space for the Wilson coefficients of the weak effective theory.

Speaker: Davide Milillo (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) A minimal abelian extension of the SM is considered, based on the introduction of a new massive, neutral gauge boson Z′. Due to the specific solution adopted for the cancellation of gauge anomalies, the new mediator has flavor non-universal couplings to quarks and leptons. As a result, quark and lepton sectors constrain each other to prevent large deviations from SM predictions. Moreover, correlations emerge between quark flavor and lepton flavor violating processes, such as lepton flavor violating B meson and purely leptonic decays. In this seminar, after reviewing the motivations and strategies for the search of BSM physics, the key aspects and predictions of this model for rare and SM-forbidden decays will be presented.