Research

Artistic impression of AGN winds, from the nuclear regions (a) to the interstella medium (b) to the galaxy scale (c). Adapted from Cicone et al. 2018, Nature Astronomy, 2, 176.

SUBWAYS

I'm involved in the XMM-Newton large program (1.6Ms) SUBWAYS: Supermassive Black holes Winds in the X-rays, the largest observing program awarded in A018 (PI M. Brusa).

The aim of the program is to produce deep X-ray observations of 20 Quasars at redshift z=0.1-0.4 (distance of 1.5-7 billions of light-years). Most of these powerful Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) show galaxy-scale outflows in the optical band (panel c).

The goal of SUBWAYS is to search for nuclear disk winds (panel a) in the X-rays, characterize the physical properties of the outflowing gas, and look for correlations between the presence and properties of the winds, and the properties of the central Black Hole (mass, accretion rate, luminosity).

SUBWAYS website

Media INAF press release

Athena

I'm part of the "Formation and growth of earliest SMBH" and "Understanding the build-up of SMBH and galaxies" Working Groups of the Athena Science Study Team (ASST).

I'm involved in simulating the performances of the Wide Field Imager (WFI) survey, that will take up to 25% of the first 4 years of Athena observing time, with the aim of detecting thousands of AGN at high redshift, and in particular ~200 at z>6 (less than 1 billion year after the Big Bang).

The Athena Observatory web site

Nustar

I'm Principal Investigator of two Nustar observing programs, for a total of 600ks, with the goal of measuring the coronal properties (electron temperature, optical depth) of four high redshift, high luminosity quasars (tow of them gravitationally lensed).

These extreme sources are the right place to test coronal emission models, in particular the existence of a forbidden region at high temperatures due to runaway electron-positron pair production.

Surveys

I'v been involved in a number of projects based on X-ray and multi-wavelength deep and wide AGN surveys, such as COSMOS, Nustar Extragalactic Survey, Stripe-82X, XMM-CDFS, WISSH, SUPER...

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