Research and Collaborations

I'm Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Genova. My research is focused primarily on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and in particular on the heretical version of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics known as Bohmian mechanics. The work involves the mathematical, physical, and conceptual analysis of Bohmian mechanics itself, the search for suitable relativistic extensions, as well as the analysis of the common structures that Bohmian mechanics shares with those formulations quantum mechanics, such as GRW and Decoherent Histories, that are not based on such vague and imprecise notions as 'measurement' or 'observer' . The goal is to understand exactly what quantum theory says and why nature should be governed by anything so bizarre as quantum theory.

My research as well as my understanding of quantum mechanics wouldn't have been possible without the life-time friendship and collaboration with Shelly Goldstein (in the picture above, the one on the right) and Detlef Dürr (the one in the middle). The main innovation of our research is the notion of 'quantum equilibrium' and the explanation of quantum phenomena based on typicality. These ideas are presented in our article Quantum Equilibrium and the Origin of Absolute Uncertainty, which is probably our most relevant contribution to the foundations of quantum mechanics. Our ideas are however not completely original as they are based on the work of David Bohm and John Bell, and are ultimately rooted in the approach of Ludwig Boltzmann to statistical mechanics. Our recent work on the extension of Bohmian mechanics to relativity and quantum field theory has benefited from the fruitful collaboration with Roderich Tumulka.

In the years, I had the pleasure of collaborating with many other friends: Karin Berndl, Martin Daumer, Stefan Teufel, James Taylor, Andrea Viale, Marco Vicari , Massimiliano Malgieri. Marco has obtained his PhD under my supervision with a work in quantum optics. Andrea, who is now making his PhD with me, is working on macromolecules interferometry and decoherence; Massimiliano, another PhD student of our group in Genova, is working on computational Bohmian mechanics (a growing area of research, especially in chemical-physics). Last but not least, I'd like to mention two former students of mine: Paolo Solinas, who has now a post-doc position in Genova and is working full-time in quantum computation and quantum information processing, and Valia Allori, who has been working on the classical limit of quantum mechanics and now is trying to get her second PhD (in philosophy, at Rutgers University).

Finally, I should mention few other things. First, the collaborations in a "wide" sense (that is without any joint published work, but with many enjoiable discussions on physics and philosophy) with GianCarlo Ghirardi and Tim Maudlin. Second, the recent project, with Valia Allori, Federico Laudisa and Mauro Dorato, of writing a book (in italian) on the philosophy of physics. Third, the collaboration (started together with Paolo Solinas) with Paolo Zanardi and Maura Sassetti, concerning the physical implementation of quantum gates in semiconductor nanostructures.


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