Becattini's main contribution to the field of relativistic heavy ion physics has been concerned with the modelling and understanding of the production of different particle species and of strangeness production comparing it with elementary collisions. Besides highly quoted papers, he gave many invited talks in conferences, workshops and seminars from 1997 to date and have been invited coauthor of the review book "Relativistic heavy ion physics" (n. 4 in the main publication list).

Recently, he got interested and published several papers about the role of spin and polarization in relativistic hydrodynamics and its possible observation in peripheral heavy ion collisions. He also wrote several papers about fundamental quantum features of relativistic hydrodynamics which have raised the interest of general relativity and cosmology community.

He has been a member of several funded projects by the Ministry of Education and Research (PRIN) and lately he is the principal investigator of the project. He has been also involved in EU research networks.