Research

My current research focuses on studying the possible mechanisms supporting the formation and growth of intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) within star clusters. These black holes have masses between hundreds and millions solar masses and may represent valuable probes of the potential pathways leading to supermassive black hole formation. Though we have growing evidence of them in very diverse stellar systems there is no clear observational smoking gun which can distinguish their effects from other types of objects. Hence, we try to investigate their formation and growth through numerical simulations. Most N-body and Monte Carlo simulations cannot tackle the extreme regimes in which IMBHs are formed, thus recent studies on the assembly of these objects in star clusters also rely on the use of semi-analytic population codes. Im currently using and developing a dynamical semi-analytic code called B-POP, check out the latest publication on the code here!

My past research focused on constraining properties of nuclear interactions in neutron stars from the multimessenger emission of binary neutron star mergers. If you want to know more about these topics, here you can find my master thesis work for which I was awarded the 2022 Milla Baldo Ceolin national prize by INFN.