SPACE seminar: 1st year PhD students (dottorandi 41° Ciclo)

Tuesday 13 Jan 2026, 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Rome

Aula 4 (San Marcellino)

Speakers: Virginia Cardillo; Mauro Fioravanti; Amedeo Giorgio Gaudio; Andrea Iacobellis; Chiara Niccolai; Francesca Scrivano; Paola Simone

Abstracts below:

• Virginia Cardillo, Precision laser positioning in space for satellite navigation, gravitation, and exploration

  • abstract: The research proposal outlines the development and validation of advanced laser positioning methodologies intended to bridge the gap between fundamental gravitational physics and high-precision Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) technologies. As space exploration expands toward the Moon and Mars, the demand for autonomous and highly accurate navigation systems becomes critical. This project focuses on the utilization of Laser RetroReflectors (LRR)—developed at INFN-LNF—onboard the initial four satellites of ESA’s Moonlight constellation, which serves as the precursor to the "Lunar Galileo" and the Lunar Communications and Navigation Services (LCNS).
    By integrating the Planetary Ephemeris Program (PEP) in collaboration with the MoonLIGHT-2/CSN2 research group, the study aims to refine orbital positioning through laser ranging observations from both Earth and lunar orbits. This approach allows for the definition of an optimal spatial metric essential for both engineering applications and gravitational measurements. The research adopts a multidisciplinary strategy, combining numerical modeling, mission simulations, and optical data analysis to characterize LRR performance directly at INFN-LNF laboratories. The expected outcomes include innovative strategies for autonomous deep-space navigation and significant contributions to General Relativity testing, laying the groundwork for future lunar and Martian exploration infrastructures.

 

• Mauro Fioravanti, Autonomous Asteroid Task Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learning

  • abstract: Spacecraft operating near small bodies require constant ground control and monitoring due to the difficulties of navigating highly non-linear dynamical environments, while managing complex spacecraft operations. An autonomous space system could reduce operational costs, enable advanced mission concepts, and increase both the quantity and quality of the scientific observations. This study investigates a learning-based autonomous agent for planning and executing scientific operations in asteroid environments, integrating a multi-instrument framework under hardware and maneuvering constraints in high-fidelity dynamics. The proposed approach formulates the planning problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process and trains a Multilayer Perceptron Deep Neural Network via Proximal Policy Optimization to optimize scientific return and operational efficiency. The agent is evaluated in simulations reproducing the detailed survey phase of the OSIRIS-REx mission, demonstrating high surface coverage performance and efficient utilization of onboard resources. A robustness analysis further shows the resilience of the agent to increased action and system parameter uncertainties. This supports the integration of learning-based autonomy into future small body missions and highlights its ability to be trained once and generalize across tasks.

 

• Amedeo Giorgio Gaudio, From the “Hot Neptunes Desert” to terrestrial planets, the PLATO era

  • abstract: In this presentation, I will briefly introduce my scientific background and outline my PhD research plan, aimed at understanding the physical mechanisms shaping the so-called "hot Neptune desert" and extending these studies toward Earth-like planets. This work is carried out in synergy with PLATO, an ESA space mission scheduled for launch in 2026, designed to detect and characterize exoplanets around bright stars. PLATO will enable population studies from close-in gaseous planets to terrestrial worlds.

 

• Andrea Iacobellis,
  • abstract: This project studies the phenomenology of oscillons, long-lived, localized, nearly time-periodic configurations of a real scalar field, in the context of ultra-light dark matter (ULDM), with particular focus on axion-like particle dark matter (ALPDM). Oscillons form when the scalar potential contains regions shallower than quadratic, since such shapes both enable parametric-resonance fragmentation of a homogeneous condensate and provide the attractive self-interaction that sustains localized lumps. Using a combination of semi-analytic Floquet/linear instability arguments and non-linear numerical evolutions, I will mainly aim to characterize the fragmentation conditions and typical length scales produced by parametric resonance, compute oscillon properties like core amplitude, radius, mass, main oscillation frequency and estimate lifetimes. Additionally, I will study the post-decay fate of oscillons, in particular their final emission of relativistic/non-relativistic scalar radiation and their possible transition into gravitationally-bound solitons akin to the cores observed in ULDM halo simulations. Numerical evidence in benchmark potentials shows extremely long oscillon lifetimes of order τ ∼ 10^8 m^−1 and larger; while for plateau-like potentials only a lower bound is indeed currently reachable, implying that oscillons can survive until around, or even beyond, matter–radiation equality and therefore can (a) seed early structure formation and (b) in some parameter ranges constitute a non-negligible or even dominant dark matter component, either directly, if they survive, or indirectly via their decay products and by setting initial conditions for soliton formation. I will quantify these possibilities and their observational consequences, some of which include effects on structure formation, warm-component constraints, MACHO/compact-object limits, and black-hole formation scenarios.

 

• Chiara Niccolai, Spectral Tests of Accretion Disc Models in Quasars
  • abstract: Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are the most luminous persistent astrophysical sources in the Universe, powered by the conversion of gravitational energy into radiation through the accretion of matter onto a supermassive black hole (SMBH). Despite their central role in modern astrophysics, the physical mechanisms responsible for their emission are not yet fully understood. Observational evidence indicates a high efficiency in the conversion of mass into energy, suggesting the presence of a geometrically thin, optically thick accretion disc. However, standard accretion disc models struggle to reproduce several observed properties of AGN. In this work, we test the reliability of the standard accretion disc model by investigating the relationship between emission-line and continuum luminosities in samples of quasars (AGN with total luminosities exceeding 10^46 erg/s) with multiple available optical observations, comparing our results with theoretical predictions.

 

• Francesca Scrivano, The LHC as a portal to Dark Matter
  • abstract: This project investigates the production of dark matter in association with one or two top quarks in proton–proton collisions, focusing on fully hadronic final states reconstructed with the CMS detector. The signal process is modeled within the framework of simplified models, which assume the production of a scalar or pseudoscalar mediator ϕ responsible for coupling Standard Model fields to dark matter candidates χ.

 

• Paola Simone, Hawking Radiation as a Probe of Physics Beyond the Standard Model
  • abstract: Hawking radiation from primordial black holes provides a promising framework bridging quantum field theory and black hole thermodynamics. We investigate the phenomenology of black hole evaporation, focusing on photon and neutrino signals arising in Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) scenarios, with particular emphasis on supersymmetric extensions. The aim is to identify distinctive features in the spectra of secondary photons and neutrinos that can be traced back to the production of supersymmetric particles in the primary Hawking emission. Such features would provide a complementary astrophysical probe of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), in addition to direct searches performed in collider experiments such as the LHC. These signatures could be explored by current and future high-energy photon and neutrino observatories, including Fermi-LAT, HESS, IceCube, and KM3NeT, potentially offering indirect evidence of new physics beyond the Standard Model.