Affiliation: Instituto de Física Corpuscular (IFIC), CSIC-Universitat de València

Fields or areas of research Experimental Astroparticle Physics: Neutrino and Dark Sector Physics

My research is focused on experimental astroparticle physics. After completing my bachelor and master studies at the University of Valencia (2005-2011), I obtained my PhD at the University of Granada (Spain, 25/09/2015). My PhD thesis was based on the study of ultra high energy cosmic rays mass composition and hadronic models within the Pierre Auger Collaboration.

After my PhD, I decided to explore other fields moving towards neutrino physics and particle detectors R&D. I was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH based at CERN from 2016 until 2019. During my first two years I participated  in the construction and operation of the first large scale prototype of a dual phase liquid argon time projection chamber, a prototype technology under study for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, DUNE. It will be a multipurpose experiment with the primary goals of performing precise measurements of muon neutrino (antineutrino) to electron neutrino (antineutrino) oscillations to address the main parameters governing the oscillation, nucleon decay searches and measurement of neutrino fluxes from supernova collapses. Among all these items, the measurement of one of the parameters driving neutrino oscillations can lead to the discovery of Charge Parity violation in the lepton sector, giving insight into the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry.

In September 2019, I won an Ambizione project (SNSF, Switzerland) and moved to Zürich ( ETH Zürich) to work on the NA64 experiment at CERN. It addresses one of the biggest open questions in particle physics: the origin of dark matter. An exciting possibility is the existence of portals between the visible and dark sectors. In addition to gravity, it might exist a new very weak force which mediates the interaction between the dark sector and the standard matter. NA64 is a fixed target experiment looking for such this type of dark sectors in the MeV-GeV energy scale. The experiment was approved in 2016 and has been taking data until the CERN long shutdown (2018). It will resume running in 2021. 

From December 2020, I am back at IFIC (Valencia) with a CDEIGENT grant from Generalitat Valenciana to continue working on R&D for noble gases time projection chambers inside the DUNE experiment.