Luca Pelicci M.Sc.

Luca Pelicci M.Sc.
  • November 2020 - Present (Doctoral student)
  • Thesis Title: Measurements of astrophysical neutrinos and neutrino properties in liquid scintillators.

Contact:
  • Phone: +49 2461 61 4123
  • E-mail: lpelicci_AT_fz-juelich.com

Research activity

My thesis is focused on the search for neutrinos produced in the nuclear fusion processes taking place in the core of our Sun, the so-called solar neutrinos. Currently, I am part of the collaboration of two liquid scintillator experiments: Borexino and JUNO.

Borexino (Since 2019)

My work has been mainly devoted to the analysis for the extraction of the CNO neutrinos interaction rate by means of a multivariate fitting procedure. I have been in charge of the preparation of data and Monte Carlo inputs for the multivariate fit, and I have worked on the estimation and impact of possible sources of systematics errors developing a new technique to estimate the stability of the detector response. The hard work of the Borexino Collaboration has culminated in a paper, submitted to PRL (you can find more details here).
More recently, I have started working on a new analysis with the aim of measuring the CNO intaraction rate without any prior knowledge on the backgrounds intrinsecally present inside the detector.
During my first year, I worked on the optimization of a Monte Carlo parameter related to the quantum efficiency of the PMTs, that was spoiling Borexino's Monte Carlo in recent years thus preventingt the use of the multivariate fit.

JUNO (Since December 2020)

I'm part of the newly created JUNO-solars working group. Currently, I'm performing sensitivity studies to intermediate energy solar neutrinos (Be7, pep and CNO neutrinos). I've been directly involved in the background estimation for the JUNO detector required for the analysis, and the sensitivity studies carried out trough a sensitivity tool specifically created for this purpose (JUST - Jülic nUsol Sensitivity Tool).

Teaching

  • Summer Semester 2021: Tutor of exercise groups for the neutrino physics part of the Particle Physics II lecture (M.Sc. Physics course) at RWTH Aachen University

Selected publications:

Events:

Proceedings:

Summer Schools:

  • INFN School of Statistics - May 15-20 - Paestum, Italy

Further publications:

Education

  • M.Sc. in Physics
    Università degli studi di Milano
    Master Thesis: Towards the detection of CNO neutrinos with Borexino experiment: stability and systematics of multivariate analysis at low energy

  • B.Sc. in Physics
    Università degli studi di Milano
    Bachelor Thesis: Sterile neutrino sensitivity studies with the Borexino detector at LNGS