Email: sciolla@mit.edu Phone: (617) 258-0541 Fax: (617) 258-5440 Address: 26-443 Related Links: Gabriella Sciolla's Home Page DMTPC Publications MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS)

Research Interests

Professor Sciolla's main interest lies in the fields of Particle and Astroparticle physics. As a member of the DMTPC collaboration, she aims to detect Dark Matter particles using a novel technology. By using a low-pressure gaseous detector, the DMTPC experiment will reconstruct the energy as well as the direction of the nuclear recoils produced by elastic collisions of Dark Matter particles. This technology can provide an unambiguous positive observation of Dark Matter even in presence of insidious backgrounds. In addition, this detector can provide unique information on the distribution of Dark Matter in our galaxy.

Professor Sciolla also studies the decays of B mesons produced in collisions between electrons and positrons in the BaBar experiment, and measures the tiny asymmetry between matter and anti-matter in the final state. This asymmetry, known as "CP violation," plays an important role in our understanding of why the Universe is made of matter instead of anti-matter. Professor Sciolla and her students also look for effects of New Physics in exotic decays of B mesons into final states that contain photons.

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Biographical Sketch

Professor Sciolla received her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Torino (Italy) working on the DELPHI experiment at LEP (CERN). After graduation, she joined the BaBar Collaboration as a Research Associate at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. She moved to MIT in 2000, were she was a Research Scientist and a Pappalardo Fellow before joining the Faculty in 2003.

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Selected Publications

Selected publications as of May 2009.

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