Research & Projects
I am a computational astrophysicist with research interests in plasma and solar physics, general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics, massively parallel numerical simulations.
At present, I'm a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Florence and a member of the Arcetri Space & Astrophysical Plasmas (ASAP) group. My project within the group is "Theoretical modeling of plasma in the expanding solar wind at kinetic scales" and it is part of the european collaboration SHOCK (Solar and Heliospheric Collisionless Kinetics: Enabling Data Analysis of the Sun to Earth Plasma System with Kinetic Modelling), funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme FP7.
My current activity is mainly focused on the following topics:
- study of turbulence and kinetic processes which characterize the plasma in the expanding solar wind by means of very high-resolution 2D numerical simulations using the hybrid particle-in-cell code CAMELIA, in collaboration with S. Landi (University of Florence), L. Matteini (Imperial College, London), A. Verdini (Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels), P. Hellinger (Astronomical Institute, Prague);
-
study of hydrodynamics and magnetic instabilities in
magnetized isolated and binary neutron stars by means of
high-resolution 3D numerical simulations using a GRMHD
code, in collaboration with R. De Pietri, A. Feo,
F. Maione (University of Parma), L. Del Zanna,
N. Bucciantini (University of Florence) and F. Loeffler
(Louisiana State University)