Lucio Cerrito

Lucio Cerrito is professor of Physics of Fundamental Interactions and Deputy Director of the Department of Physics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata; he studies the production and mass of the top quark, the associated production of W-bosons with bottom and charm quarks, and the Higgs boson in high-energy hadronic collisions. The analysis of the production and dynamics of heavy quarks at the energy frontier could lead to the discovery of unknown particles and forces which might advance our understanding of the Universe and its space-time fabric.

Professor Cerrito works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (Switzerland) since 2007. He was a member of the CDF Collaboration at the Tevatron collider in the USA in the early 2000’s, where he measured properties of the W (the polarisation at high transverse momentum) and of the top quark (the production rate and mass), worked on the early alignment of the tracking detector and was responsible for the operations of the central muon detectors during the Run II commissioning phase and until 2004. In 2004, Prof. Cerrito investigated a claim of new physics in W and jets with semileptonic B decays. He went on to study the charge correlation of W and B in top pairs and while searching for anomalies on the charge signs of the muon from the semileptonic heavy quark decay and the accompanying W, he performed the first measurement of W+charm production cross section. This technique allows the direct determination of the strange quark density in the proton. Prof. Cerrito performed with ATLAS data the first measurement of CP violation in B from top decays (2016) and in 2019 he led the most precise top quark mass measurement using semileptonic B decays. Professor Cerrito is a grantee of the European Research Council for the project NPTEV-TQP2020, Fellow of the UK Institute of Physics and Fellow of the of the UK Higher Education Academy. For further information: https://www.fisica.uniroma2.it/lcerrito