My research is mostly focussed on the theory of strong interactions, perturbative QCD, currently of great interest because of the needs of physics at the LHC, in particular in the study of the properties of the Higgs boson. An extended effort has gone into resummation: the development of computational techniques for the perturbative computation of particular classes of perturbative contributions to all orders in the strong coupling. As a spokesperson of the NNPDF collaboration, I was amongst the first to propose the use of AI methods in theoretical particle physics in the context of the determination of the parton distributions (PDFs) which encode the structure of the nucleon. More recently I have been pursuing in the same context the development and use of modern machine learning metohdologies.
In 2017 I have been awarded an ERC advanced grant, which has supported the N3PDF project, that over the years from 2018 to 2023 has developed new artificial intelligence methods and improved theoretical and methodological results in precision standard model physics for the determination of PDFs.
I have also worked on various aspects of quantum field theory, specifically anomalies, i.e. the quantum breaking of a classical symmetry, fractional statistics, i.e. 2+1 dimensional particles which are neither bosons nor fermions, and the structure of renormalization group flows.