Research, to Ornella Juliana Piccinni the L’Oreal Unesco award ‘For Women and Science 2021’

Ornella Juliana Piccinni – researcher of the Rome 1 section of Infn at the Amaldi Research Center of Sapienza University of Rome and member of the Virgo collaboration – with the L’Oreal-Unesco prize “For Women and Science 2021 “. In fact, during an online event, the names of the winners of the Italian edition of the L’Oréal-Unesco prize were announced and Piccinni was among the six young scientists awarded. The L’Oréal Unesco award is an annual reference event in the context of initiatives aimed at raising public awareness of the essential role played by women within the scientific enterprise. The Infn reports that the scientist has been awarded a scholarship worth 20,000 euros thanks to a project dedicated to the modeling and identification of the gravitational signals produced by magnetars, neutron stars with an extremely intense magnetic field. Established in 2002 by the French cosmetics company L’Oréal, in collaboration with the Italian National Commission for Unesco, the “For Women and Science” award provides for the assignment of financial loans of the same amount to 6 female scientists under 35 active in the fields of Life and Matter Sciences, in order to favor and support their research work and their professional growth in Italian universities or research centers. The jury responsible for selecting the projects submitted by the candidates has been chaired since 2017 by Lucia Votano, Infn research manager. “The idea behind my project, on which my research activity will focus for the next ten months thanks to the scholarship won today – explained Ornella Juliana Piccinni – is to develop a specific line of analysis for the study of signals. gravitational emitted by magnetars, young neutron stars produced as a result, for example, of the merger of binary systems composed of at least one progenitor neutron star and characterized by a high rotation and an extreme magnetic field “. “The gravitational waves generated by these extreme objects – continued the researcher – should in fact be characterized by a greater persistence than those detected today with the Ligo and Virgo interferometers”. Piccinni explained that “the detection of signals with these characteristics could therefore further confirm the existence of magnetars, still subject to discussion in the scientific community. In addition, the identification of the electromagnetic counterpart of these gravitational waves would provide us with further details on their source and would represent a further success of the so-called multi-message astronomy “. Advanced Virgo, together with the two US Advanced Ligo detectors and the Japanese Kagra one, is one of the four laser interferometers that make up the international network of observatories dedicated to the detection of gravitational waves. Located in Cascina, in the province of Pisa, it is housed at the Ego European Gravitational Observatory, founded in 2000 by the Infn and the French Center National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). In addition to the fundamental contribution provided to the study of gravitational waves through the role played within the Virgo collaboration, Infn is now the lead partner of the Einstein Telescope (Et) project, which involves the construction of a new generation interferometer. One of the candidate sites to host this future large research infrastructure is the Sos Enattos mine in Sardinia.