Welcome to my home page. I am a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Max-Planck institute for extraterrestrial physics in Garching bei München, Germany, working in the high-energy group on the preparation of the eROSITA mission.
Previously I was a postdoc working at ISDC Data Centre for Astrophysics in Geneva, Switzerland, in the ASTRO-H group led by Stéphane Paltani. Before this I was «Ochiallini» fellow at the Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica in Milano, Italy, working in Silvano Molendi’s group. I finished my PhD in 2008 under the supervision of Thierry Courvoisier at the ISDC.
My research interests are on galaxy clusters, observational cosmology and high-energy astrophysics. See my list of publications here.
My main research topics are the following:
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-Non-thermal phenomena in galaxy clusters
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-Structure-formation processes
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-The missing baryons
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-Clusters as cosmological tools
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-Dark matter
I recently published several papers on the characterization of the accretion flow in cluster outskirts, including the first relatively large cluster sample with high-quality constraints over the entire cluster volume (see the Planck/ROSAT project). I am the PI of the XMM-Newton Cluster Outskirts Project, a Very-Large Program (1.2 Ms) on ESA’s cornerstone X-ray mission XMM-Newton. This is the largest program allocated in XMM AO-13.
I recently published a paper in Nature reporting the detection of three filaments of hot gas, galaxies and dark matter linked with the massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (see below). This work was the subject of an ESA press release.
Beyond my own research, I am also participating to several international collaborations. I am an active member of sthe XXL collaboration and co-chair of the ATHENA working group on the Astrophysics of galaxy groups and clusters.
During my PhD, I worked mainly on non-thermal processes in galaxy clusters. My results on the detection of a high-energy tail in the Ophiuchus cluster were the subject of an ESA press release. You can also have a look at my PhD thesis, for which I received the 2009 Vacheron Constantin award.
On this web site you can download some software that I wrote for particular purpose: the PROFFIT software for the analysis of X-ray surface-brightness profiles (A&A 526, 79), and the ghost_busters code (A&A 479, 27) for the treatment of INTEGRAL/IBIS images, that is now part of the OSA9 pipeline.
