Paolo Zuccon

Biography

Paolo Zuccon is born in Italy where he conducted most of his research work before joining the MIT as Assistant Professor in January 2012. He received his Laurea in Fisica (Master Degree in Physcs) in 1998 at the Padova University defending a thesis about the analysis of data a from NOMAD, a CERN Neutrino Oscillation experiment. He also spent another year after the degree working on Neutrino Physics with prof. M. Baldo-Ceolin. Then he moved to the Perugia University where he worked in the Prof. R. Battiston group as graduate student analyzing the AMS-01 data. He got his Ph.D. in 2003 at Perugia University defending a thesis about a model of the cosmic rays interaction with the Earth magnetosphere based on AMS-01 data. He worked as post-doc and then as research scientist for the Perugia branch of Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), with a major involvement of the AMS-02 project for what concerns the silicon tracker data acquisition and reconstruction software. He also took part to other projects aimed to support the high luminosity phase of the LHC project

Research Interest

Professor Zuccon's research is centered on the search for new Physics in the cosmic rays. His recent work has mostly been associated with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer 02, a particle physics detector installed on the International Space Station measuring the cosmic rays flux. He participated to the construction and qualification of the AMS-02 Silicon Tracker and he designed and implemented the silicon tracker data reconstruction software. He formed a new group at MIT with the goal of searching for signatures of the dark matter nature in the AMS-02 large statistic data. He is currently working on the measurement of the positron and anti-proton spectra.