Luca Boccioli

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in Physics at the University California, Berkeley. I received my Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame, under the supervision of Prof. Grant Mathews. I earned my B.S. at the University of Perugia, where I also earned my M.S. My research interests mostly focus on Core-Collapse Supernovae, i.e. the explosion of massive stars. More specifically, I am interested in the role that General Relativity, the Nuclear Equation of State and neutrino physics have in triggering the explosion. More recently I got interested in convection in astrophysical environments (primarily supernovae and the interior of Proto-Neutron Stars), the role of muons in the collapse phase of a supernova, and Collective Neutrino Oscillations. My most recent projects, however, focus on Explosive Nucleosynthesis and the structure of pre-supernova progenitors, in particular regarding Carbon-Oxygen Shell Mergers.

• CV

Most recent work

First of all, if your research interests align with any of the things I mention in this website, feel free to contact me! Currently I'm moving towards the explosive nucleosynthesis in CCSNe, as well as on studying peculiar nucleosynthesis sites, such as Carbon-Oxygen shell mergers in the pre-SN stage. For some interesting work I have done in the past, you can look at this paper for a criterion to predict the explodability of a star, and at this paper for a way to estimate what the remnant mass will be. Basically, if you want to know if a pre-supernova star is going to explode, and what the remnant mass is going to be, all you need to know is the density profile of your I ron core, and that's it! In my most recent paper I studied how Neutrino Heating changes with compactness (see Figure on the right) in 1D, 1D+ (i.e. 1D simulations with the addition of convection through Mixing-Length Theory), 2D and 3D simulations. High compactness leads to large neutrino heating. Therefore, high-mass stars, which tend to have large compactnesses, especially at low metallicities, are very likely to lead to succesfull explosions. How much mass will actually be ejected in these explosions and how much, instead, will collapse back onto the remnant to form a black hole is a topic of active research, and I am also going to study that (if I have time!).