Massimiliano Putignano

Massimiliano earned his high-school International Baccalaureate in May 2000 at the United World College of Atlantic, Wales. The years spent at Atlantic College, whose mission is to bring together students from all around the world to foster culture exchange in an environment of academic excellence, proved instrumental both to his passion for Physics and love for internationality. Following his baccalaureate, he studied Physics at the University of Bari, Italy, specializing in solid state and lasers. He also spent one year at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, as an ERASMUS student, focusing on advanced mathematics. His master’s thesis, in cooperation with an industrial partner, focused on the analysis and development of an interferometric sensor measuring off-axis displacements, and included both experimental work and theoretical analysis.

Following his degree Massimiliano worked as a postgraduate within his former laser group until 2008 when he became a member of the Quasar Group, based at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. The project concerned the development of a novel non-perturbing beam profile monitor based on a gas-jet curtain. The monitor, though optimized for operation with the low-energy projectiles and low pressure vacuum of the Ultra-low Energy Storage Ring, features high flexibility for use in all applications where fast, non-perturbing measurements are required, and lends itself for inclusion in the ‘reaction microscope’, used for quantum reactions spectroscopy. This project gave him the opportunity to explore the fascinating field of accelerator physics and fluid-dynamics, together with exploiting his previous experience in optics through the application of an original interferometric scheme to the analysis of the gas-jet.

In March 2009, Massimiliano entered the DITANET network and moved to the University of Liverpool, where he is pursuing his PhD project in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute.