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Daniele DE GRUTTOLA Curriculum

Associate Professor in Experimental High Energy Physics (SSD FIS/01) at the Physics Department "E. R. Caianiello" of the University of Salerno (Unisa), from 02/03/2020. Author/co-author of 415 articles in international journals with refereed, with 26437 citations and an h-index 87 (Scopus data updated to 07/03/2023).

His research focuses on nuclear and subnuclear experimental physics and the development of particle detectors for high-energy physics. In particular: particle physics to colliders (ALICE, ePIC), cosmic rays (EEE) and dark matter (DS-20k). He graduated in 2004 in Physics at the University of Salerno with a thesis entitled "Construction and testing of the Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers for the detection of cosmic radiation with very high energy".

His work during his thesis was focused on the study of the "Multigap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC), in two experiments: Extreme Energy Events (EEE) and A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) at LHC at CERN in Geneva.

ALICE is a "general-purpose" detector for heavy ion physics, with the main objective of studying the physics of Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) and strongly interacting matter, which is created under extreme conditions of energy density and temperature in core-core collisions. MRPCs are used in ALICE as a Time Of Flight (TOF) flight time system to provide indispensable measurements in central barrel tracking and improve Particle IDentrification (PID).

The EEE Project is a matrix of 60 muon telescopes (each consisting of three 2x1m^2 MRPCs) installed in the laboratories of INFN, Centro Fermi (CREF), CERN and secondary schools throughout Italy to measure cosmic radiation. He obtained his PhD in 2008 with a thesis entitled "Development and construction of a Time Of Flight (TOF) system for charged Hadron identification in ALICE at LHC". During his PhD work he was co-head of the ALICE TOF group, for the testing, assembly and installation of the 18 MRPC "supermodules" of the TOF system of ALICE, with the responsibility of coordinating the hardware activities and the first performance studies of the system.

On 30 December 2016, he obtained a research position at the Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche Enrico Fermi (CREF) in Rome, a position abandoned in March 2020, to become Associate Professor at the University of Salerno. prof. De Gruttola has been, since 2004, Scientific Associate at CERN in Geneva, where for 12 consecutive years (with the support of post-doc positions of the University of Salerno, CREF and INFN-CERN fellowship) he has held and several responsibilities in the ALICE experiment:

  • MRPC R&D to study the possible geometries and configurations of electronics to be used in the TOF of ALICE TOF (2004-2006);
  • Data acquisition on beam-test data taking to complete the R&D phase of TOF R&D (2004-2006);
  • Responsible for testing the front-end cards for the distribution of triggers and Low Voltage to TOF, carried out in the laboratories of the Department of Physics of UNISA (2006-2007);
  • Mass production of MRPC in INFN laboratories in Bologna: responsible for quality assurance of production processes (2005-2008);
  • Assembly, testing and commissioning of TOF, and data capture with cosmic rays (2007-2008);
  • TOF expert during PP and Pb-Pb collision data socket (2008-2011);
  • Optimization of the code used for the "physics selection" in ALICE, Period ALICE Run Coordinator and study of the trigger for rare events (in particular Ultra Peripheral Collisions - UPC) (2011);
  • Main UPC physics data analyser with Pb-Pb, Xe-Xe and p-Pb collision data to investigate "gluon shadowing" and "gluon saturation in the proton"; UPCs allow to study electromagnetic processes in the absence of hadronic interactions and represent a powerful tool for studying the function of gluon distribution in the nucleus and in the proton (2011-2014);
  • Data Quality Monitor (DQM) System Run Coordinator with the responsibility of coordinating about 200 researchers for the debugging and management of the framework to monitor data for all sub-detectors of ALICE (2014 - 2018);
  • Currently in charge of the new data quality monitoring system (Quality Control - QC) used in ALICE since LHC RUN3 (2019 - ongoing).

Since 2006, Prof De Gruttola has been the local head of 5 telescopes of the EEE Project and since 2017 he is technical coordinator of the Project. The main objective of the EEE Project is the detection and study of cosmic radiation, thanks to the use of muon telescopes, with excellent performance in terms of efficiency, spatial and time resolution and tracking capabilities. His work at EEE includes data analysis (in particular the study of detector performance) and teaching for Italian secondary school students involved in the project.

From 2018 to 2023 Prof De Gruttola was the local leader of the Salerno group of the Darkside-20k experiment, which aims to research dark matter and will take data from 2020 at the National Laboratories of Gran Sasso (LNGS). During this five-year period, he was outreach responsible for the experiment and local head of the INFN’s outreach dark matter acronym, DARK.



Since 2023, Prof De Gruttola has been the local head of the ePIC experiment, under the name INFN EIC_NET, part of the Electron Ion Collider International Collaboration (EIC). EIC, currently in the R&D phase, will be an accelerator, installed in the Brookhaven National Laboratory (USA) that will collide electrons and protons/nuclei to study the inner structure of hadrons and the role of gluons in matter. In particular, the Salerno team is responsible for simulating the dRICH detector of the experiment and installing, in the particle physics laboratory of the Department of Physics of UNISA, a test station for the SiPMs used in the dRICH (in collaboration with various INFN and Italian and International universities).

Additional information

  • member of Paper Committee for ALICE UPC physics;
  • scientific associate at CERN since 2005;
  • scientific associate at INFN since 2005;
  • member of the organizing and scientific committee of 2° Convegno Nazionale sulla Fisica di ALICE - Vietri (Sa) in 2006;
  • supervisor of a CERN Summer Student for the project “Set up and programming of an ALICE Time-Of-Flight trigger facility and software implementation for its Quality Assurance (QA) during LHC Run 2”, proposed by De Gruttola and selected in 2016;
  • member of the organizing and scientific committee of the 27th International Conference Quark Matter - Venice in 2018;
  • Principal Investigator of a selected MAECI project of cooperation Italy-Korea “Development of MRPC with Ecological Gas (DMEG)”: new MRPC geometry, configuration and gas mixtures are studied in order to replace the C2F4H2-based gas mixture which has very high Global Warming Potential (GWP) value;
  • masterclass author Darkside and EEE;
  • software skills: c++ (root and aliroot), html, php, MySQL;
  • referee activiry for JINST and EPJ C;
  • qualified as full professor;
  • talk contributions in 20 conferences to report ALICE results (6 invited talks) and 2 conferences to report EEE results (1 invited talk);
  • invited talks:
  1. J/psi photoproduction in Pb-Pb and p-Pb ultra-peripheral collisions with ALICE at LHC, 9-11 July 2011 DESY, Hamburg Germany, Physics in Intense Fields;
  2. Recent ALICE results and plans, 10-14 February 2013, Cairo (Egypt), Primordial QCD Matter in Early Universe;
  3. J/psi photoproduction in Pb-Pb ultra-peripheral collisions at √sNN = 2.76 TeV with ALICE at LHC, 20-24 May 2013, Paris France, Photon 2013;
  4. J/psi photoproduction in Pb-Pb and p-Pb ultra-peripheral collisions with ALICE at LHC, 8-14 September 2013, Illa da Toxa, Galizia Spain, International Conference on the Initial Stages in High-Energy Nuclear Collisions (IS2013);
  5. Physics of Ultra-peripheral collisions with ALICE at LHC, 9-11 April 2014, LNGS Assergi and GSSI L’Aquila, Congresso IFAE;
  6. Ultra-peripheral collisions and photoproduction with ALICE at the LHC: results and perspectives, 7-11 September 2015, Palaiseau France, POETIC 6 - Physics Opportunities at Electron-Ion Collider, Ecole Polythecnique;
  7. First results from coordinated data taking by the Extreme Energy Events experiment, 14-15 September 2015, Gallipoli, CRIS 2015 - Cosmic Ray International Seminar
  • several outreach contributions at CERN, Italian Universities and other public events.