Research

The world around us is governed by four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces, and gravity. With the exception of gravity, the forces are understood in the context of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, which provides the framework to understand interactions of elementary particles. On the other hand, gravity is described using General Relativity, which predicts the motions of planets, the dynamics of binary black hole systems, and the evolution of the entire universe. Surprisingly, despite the Standard Model being inherently quantum and General Relativity being a classical theory, both can be expressed within the same mathematical framework, quantum field theory (QFT), by interpreting gravity as a low-energy effective field theory. The scope of my work is broad at ranges from formal aspects of QFT to the phenomenology of the SM and beyond and gravitational wave physics. At the core of my research lies a deep interest in the structure of scattering amplitudes, which comprise the most basic building blocks that encode how particles interact.

A central focus of my research is the phenomenology of the top quark, as it is the heaviest known elementary particle and plays a pivotal role in the SM. Processes involving top-quark pairs and additional electroweak bosons are of unique interest in exploring the connection between gauge, scalar and flavor dynamics in the SM, and could point to potential new physics. The characterization of the top-quark sector by the end of the High-Luminosity LHC will be the most accurate one even compared to most planned future colliders. Therefore, it is essential to harness the full power of the LHC datasets, which in turn demands for improved theoretical predictions.

In parallel, I am advancing the technical frontier of amplitude computations, with a focus on multi-loop processes involving massive particles. Such amplitudes are essential to provide the much needed high-precision predictions for top-quark physics, but remain a major bottleneck due to their algebraic and analytic complexity. I am developing novel methods that blend analytic with numerical reconstruction techniques, enabling progress on problems that were previously out of reach.

The same techniques can be applied in the context of gravitational wave physics to obtain the classical dynamics of a binary black hole system from quantum scattering amplitudes. I am particulary interested in the study of spinning black holes using higher-spin quantum field theories of massive particles.