Research Activities

Decentralized Science

The term decentralized science (DeSci) refers both to a scientific community movement and an alternative scientific infrastructure built on top of the blockchain, in an attempt to improve modern science. From a digital perspective, the term generally refers to an open, permissionless, and highly interoperable protocol stack built on public smart contract platforms. DeSci aims to replicate existing scientific services in an more open and transparent way. In particular, DeSci does not rely on intermediaries and centralized institutions. Instead, it is based on open protocols and decentralized applications ... read more

Stability of Nanoparticle-stabilized Emulsions

The stability of Pickering emulsions, i.e. nanoparticle-stabilized emulsions, has attracted enormous attention because of a variety of applications including drug delivery, cosmetics, food-stuffs, waste-water treatment, and even energy applications. Nanoparticles of different chemical and mechanical properties can be used to stabilize emulsions. Qualitative analysis is thus needed to improve the stability of Pickering emulsions and understand the fundamentals and applications of the phenomena that contribute ... read more

Molecular Design of Gas Hydrate Antiagglomerants

The understanding of the relation between collective properties and performance of antiagglomerants used in gas hydrate management has been a major issue in a variety of scientific and industrial contexts, including climate change modeling, hydrocarbon extraction, natural gas storage, and planetary surface chemistry. Gas hydrates are ice-like inclusion compounds consisting of polyhedral hydrogen-bonded water cages stabilized by guest gas molecules. They are not chemical compounds because no strong chemical bonds exist between water and gas molecules. They are formed under high pressure and low temperature conditions ... read more

Conformational Dynamics of Biological Systems

Conformational dynamics induced by mechanical or biochemical constraints in biological systems, such as DNA and proteins, is a central issue for biologists and remains challenging for physicists. Indeed, it is of paramount importance in understanding biomolecular interactions and directly concerns the understanding of equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium processes in vivo. The idea is that a global overview of the systems' energy surface is useful for a quantitative understanding of the relationships between structure, dynamics, stability, and biological functions. Thanks to the continuous increase of the computing power ... read more

Enhanced Sampling of Complex Systems: From Thermodynamics to Kinetics

The study of the free energy landscape of nature-inspired systems is of paramount importance in understanding complex interaction mechanisms. The idea is that a global overview of the systems' energy surface is useful for a quantitative understanding of the relationships between structure, dynamics, stability, and functional behaviours. Thanks to the continuous increase of the computing power and of the reliability of empirical force fields, molecular dynamics simulations have become a widely employed computational technique to simulate the dynamics of complex systems. Under the assumption of ergodicity, the equilibrium properties ... read more

Structure formation in Cosmology

The formation of structures in the Universe is one of the major questions in Cosmology. The growth of sructure in the linear regime of low amplitude fluctuations is well understood analytically, but N-body simulations remain the main tool to probe the "non-linear" regime where fluctuations are large. Approaching this question from the more general perspective of statistical physics and of out-of-equilibrium dynamics of systems with long-range interaction highlights a different look on this problem. In this context, it is natural to develop simplified models to improve our understanding of these systems, ... read more

Long-range interacting systems

Systems with long-range interactions are characterized by a pair potential which decays at large distances as a power law, with an exponent smaller than the space dimension. Examples are gravitational and Coulomb interactions. The thermodynamic and dynamical properties of such systems were poorly understood until a few years ago. Substantial progress has been made only recently, when it was realized that the lack of additivity induced by long-range interactions does not hinder the development of a fully consistent thermodynamic formalism. This has, however, important consequences ... read more

last update: March 2022

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