Dr A Romano

Summary

Angela is currently a Research Fellow in particle physics at the University of Birmingham. She performs wide-ranging work on the NA62 fixed-target experiment at CERN as well as being involved in teaching and outreach duties. Her research field is the study of kaons, which has always been an important input in the investigation of fundamental interactions and for the understanding of the symmetries of nature. The NA62 experiment is the current focus of kaon physics research at CERN.

Previous Employments

In 2008 Angela was granted a student fellowship at the University of Naples “Federico II”, funded by a PRIN grant. From 2012 to 2015 she worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, funded by an European Research Council (ERC) grant.

Education

Angela graduated in Physics at the University of Naples “Federico II” and got her PhD in Particle Physics at the University of Birmingham in 2013. For her PhD thesis she analysed the leptonic radiative kaon decay channel, K⁺ -> e⁺ nu gamma, which is sensitive to Chiral Perturbation Theory (ChPT) up to the next-to-next-to-leading order, using data collected by NA62 in 2007.

Research

Angela was heavily involved in the assembly of the KTAG photon detector system, which is responsible for the fast identification of kaons within the NA62 experiment. In 2011 she coordinated a test beam at CERN aiming at the commissioning of the detector for NA62 and testing of new front-end read-out electronics and Hamamatsu PMTs. In 2013 she received an ISIS beam time award as Principal Investigator and was co-responsible (with Dr Antonino Sergi) for testing commercial Altera Stratix-III FPGA and DDR-SRAM components of the KTAG readout system for radiation induced Single Event Effect (SEE) from muons and neutrons at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). Since 2015 she has been co-responsible for the maintenance, monitoring and detector performance of the KTAG detector during NA62 data taking.

She is currently in charge of the NA62 High Level Trigger (HLT) system, which is part of the innovative Trigger and Data Acquisition (TDAQ) system. She is responsible for the HLT system from a data-quality perspective. She also authors HLT trigger-related software tools that are available in the NA62 software framework.

• maintenance of software tools for offline matching between the kaon and the pion particles for the K⁺ -> pi⁺ nu nu-bar decay analysis (the primary goal of NA62);
• measurement of the HLT efficiency for the K⁺ -> pi⁺ nu nu-bar decay analysis;
• measurement of the radiative K⁺ -> e⁺/mu⁺ nu gamma decay form factors with NA62 data collected in 2016-2017 runs;
• leadership of the feasibility study for Heavy Neutral Leptons decaying to pi + e or pi + mu using data collected with the NA62 detector operated in dump mode during the 2016 run.

Positions of responsability

Angela coordinates the NA62 HLT system and her duties include: coordination of a small team, offline assessment of software trigger algorithms, online implementation, development of user interface, monitoring and control systems, assessment of global HLT system performance (data reduction factor and trigger efficiency). She also takes on the following responsibilities during NA62 runs:

• NA62 online system (HLT-PCFarm) expert
• KTAG expert
• Run Control expert
• On-line Monitor expert

Teaching and outreach duties

Anglela has been involved in outreach activities including: university open days, science public talks, media interview from STFC Public Relations department , coordination and co-supervision of school and university exhibits at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in London. She is currently involved in the following teaching duties : Y3 Nuclear lab, Y4 project and postgraduate student supervision.