Lorenzo Aiello

I am an experimental Physicist working on the development of the instrumentation for the current (Advanced Virgo) and next-generation (Einstein Telescope) gravitational waves detectors.

I am part of the LIGO/Virgo collaboration since 2015, the year in which I graduated in Astrophysics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata with an experimental thesis in the Virgo group led by prof. Viviana Fafone.

I continued to work with the Virgo Tor Vergata group during my PhD in Astroparticle Physics, earned in July 2019 with a joint title between SISSA (Trieste) and GSSI (L'Aquila).
In this period, I dealt on one side with the development of future actuators for one of the Advanced Virgo's subsystem - the TCS, Thermal Compensation System. At the same time, I worked also directly on site taking part both to the installation/test/commissioning of the TCS subsystem and to the commissioning of the whole experiment in view of the observing runs O2 (2017) and O3 (2019-2020).

During the last year of PhD, I got a post-doctoral Research Associate position at Cardiff University. I joined prof. Hartmut Grote and prof. Kate Dooley's experimental group in October 2019, contributing to the setting up from scratch of a lab with a cleanroom inside.
During my postdoctoral experience in Cardiff, I contributed to rig up a table-top experiment for the experimental verification of some theories of quantum gravity based on the holographic principle. The experiment is called QUEST and it consists of two co-located power-recycled Michelson interferometers. QUEST is currently in the commissioning phase, with the target to achieve an order of magnitude better sensitivity with respect to a previous experiment - the Holometer, in operation at Fermilab until 2018. The begin of the data taking is forecast to 2024.
During the post-doc I also researched for scalar field dark matter signals in the Holometer's data. Although no signal has been identified, we obtained new upper limits on the coupling between the scalar field dark matter and the photon/electron field, demonstrating how the data of experiment built with a completely different science goal could be used for research in other Physics' fields.

Since June 2023, I affiliate to the Physics Department of the University of Rome Tor Vergata as Assistant Professor - TDa researcher.