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.

• 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 working on developing a model for proto-neutron star convection, but I am still at the early stages of this, so I don't have much to say. One thing that is important to note is that current models based on mixing-length theory are not very good at predicting several properties of convection, and therefore it's time to improve on it! Before that I have just submitted a paper where I developed a criterion that predicts the outcome of the supernova based on the pre-collapse density profile of the progenitor star. Its accuracy is >90%, and the same exact number and criterion was indipendently derived by another group, so it is fair to say this is a very robust criterion. 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 pre-supernova star, and that's it!