Dr. Salvatore Bottaro studied theoretical physics with a thesis on the axion potential at finite temperature at the University of Pisa and Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and graduated in 2018.

 

During his PhD research at Scuola Normale, he focused on the phenomenology of electroweak candidates of dark matter known as WIMP. Noted in his published papers on the subject, Bottaro classified all the perturbative candidates for the first time and determined if and how they can be discovered with future collider and direct detection experiments. Toward the end of his PhD research, he started working on the cosmology of large-scale structure (LSS) in the Universe. Dr. Bottaro’s goal in the coming years is to determine how new information on the dark sector can be extracted using both linear and non-linear cosmological probes, like galaxy distributions, which can provide some of the most precise measurements of the cosmological parameters.

 

As a new postdoctoral researcher at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Dr. Michael Geller and Prof. Tomer Volansky, Dr. Bottaro is continuing his research on the cosmology of LSS, decipher ways to probe dark matter using astrophysical observables and discover new connections between cosmology and quantum field theory.