Francesco is a Postdoctoral Appointee at in the Medium Energy Physics group at Argonne National Laboratory. He joined ANL after graduating at Temple University of Philadelphia in 2021, with a dissertation titled ​“Design of the electron spectrometer for the HUNTER experiment and timescale of electron thermalization in liquid Argon for directional detection of WIMP dark matter”. During the course of his graduate program he contributed to the design of a heavy neutrino search experiment named HUNTER. He developed an advanced simulation framework for the electron spectrometer used in the experiment, and an efficient energy-momentum reconstruction technique for the Auger electrons to be collected in the framework of the HUNTER experiment.

Francesco is working toward performing quantum simulations using ultracold ytterbium atoms trapped in reconfigurable optical tweezer arrays. This system will leverage the long coherence times enabled by the unique atomic structure of neutral ytterbium and strong interactions from highly excited ​“Rydberg states” to simulate effective field theories for quantum chromodynamics.  Currently, he is working on building the cooling and trapping systems necessary to prepare ytterbium atoms in optical tweezer arrays.