Two young PhDs from the University of Milan received a special mention from two INFN Scientific Commissions for their theses concluded in 2018.
Enrico Maria Malatesta (on the left in the photo) was awarded by the Fourth Commission for his thesis on theoretical physics in the context of the Fubini Prize. Simone Sala (on the right in the photo) was awarded by the Third Commission for his thesis on experimental nuclear physics in the context of the Villi Prize.
Enrico Maria Malatesta studied some well known problems of combinatorial optimization, with methods of statistical field theory proper to disordered systems, under the supervision of Prof. Sergio Caracciolo. In his thesis entitled "Random Combinatorial Optimization Problems: Mean Field and Finite-Dimensional Results " in particular, the first corrections to the behavior of mean field theory in the so-called "assignment "problem were obtained analytically, and very detailed information was also obtained for other similar problems, also in low dimensions, for which the mean field approach is not sufficient.
The Ph.D. Thesis work of Simone Sala has been made in the frame of the QUPLAS (QUantum Interferometry and Gravitation with Positrons and LASers) experiment at the L-NESS Laboratory of the Politecnico di Milano in Como.
In QUPLAS, electrons, positrons and positronium are used to the goal of testing fundamental symmetries such as the CPT theorem and the Weak Equivalence Principle. The first phase of QUPLAS-0 measurements, the thesis work of Simone Sala, consisted in the first demonstration of
quantum interference of an antimatter particle: the positron. The experiment made use of a 5-20 keV positron beam, an interferometer working in the Talbot-Lau mode and an emulsion detector. The experiment was realized in the single-particle mode therefore providing the second
evidence of single-particle interference (after the celebrated Merli-Missiroli-Pozzi result with electrons). This reasult has been included among the Top-10 2019 Breakthrough Experiments in Physics by the
Physics World magazine. Thesis advisors for Simone Sala have been Stefano Olivares and the QUPLAS spokesman Marco Giammarchi.