I am at the second year of my Ph.D. thesis work at the University of Naples. My main activity is the evaluation of signal and background expected in experiments that aim to provide evidence of neutrino oscillations, searching in nuclear emulsions for the appearance of tau neutrinos in a muonic neutrino beam. This work is focused on the analysis of specific topologies of neutrino interactions in emulsions and the statistical treatment of the results. These studies are carried out for the CHORUS and OPERA experiments, to maximize their sensitivity to neutrino oscillation. I am involved in "Phase II" emulsion scanning for the CHORUS experiment, with a new technique recently developed.

For my Ph.D. thesis I am working on the electric and magnetic polarizabilities of hadrons. Especially, I am focused on the process of Compton scattering on pions. My task is to predict theoretically these polaribilities via extracting from the differential cross sections and to provide these polarizabilities for the preparing experiment in Hall B in Jefferson Lab. They are going to investigate the feasibility of measuring the polarizabilities of positive charged pion using polarized photons and the CLAS detector.

The topic of my Ph.D. thesis is the problem of ultra-high energy cosmic rays, in particular the composition of primary particles with energy above 10e19 eV. The compositional behaviour plays a crucial role in attempts to undestand the origin and nature of cosmic rays in this energy range. I am currently starting a collaboration with the experimental group working on Pierre Auger Observatory, the biggest detector of cosmic ray which is currently under construction in Argentina. I will be working on the analysis of the data from the fluorescence detectors.
The scientific activity that I have been carrying out has been devoted to the study very high-energy astrophysics (gamma-ray burst, supernova explosions, accretion disks and high energy cosmic rays). Now I am analysing the motion of cosmic rays in various magnetic field and their acceleration mechanism in strong magnetic fields in the astrophysical objects. The most important part of my work is the modelling of the interaction of ultra-high energy particles with radiation, ambient plasma and their energy losses in magnetic field. I will try to link my work with some open questions in astroparticle physics and cosmology.