Research Interests:

Prof. Conetti´s main interest is the study of heavy quarks and what they can teach us about the fundamental rules of the elementary particles world. After measuring the lifetime of the charmed quark, Prof. Conetti participated in a series of experiments, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, to understand the mechanisms responsible for the formation of a bound pair of charm-anticharm quarks. In the future he will be involved in the study of Charge-Parity (CP) violation, a small puzzling asymmetry in the behavior of matter versus anti-matter. This tiny effect might be one of the ingredients necessary to explain why we live in a universe of pure matter, in spite of the original matter/antimatter symmetry believed to exist at the time of the Big Bang. CP violation was first observed in the decays of strange quarks and it should manifest itself even more in the decays of beauty (or bottom) quarks. Future experimental activity will include the study of both strange and beauty quarks, in experiments run respectively at an electron-positron collider at the Frascati Laboratory near Rome and at the highest energy proton accelerator ever to be built, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. For this last experiment, Prof. Conetti has led a large group of physicists from several universities working on the "trigger", i.e. the selection in real time of Beauty decay candidates out of the abundance of "uninteresting" events occurring at a rate of several millions per second.

Research Group(s):

High Energy Physics Group