Federico Antinori is a research scientist with the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Padova, currently working on the ALICE experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
He did his thesis at the University of Genova (Italy) in 1989, on “Hadroproduction of charmed hadrons” working on fixed target experiment WA82 at the CERN SPS.
He has been active in the field of ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions since the early nineties. After an initial training in particle physics, with contributions ranging from physics analysis to trigger and data acquisition and to detector studies in heavy flavour experiment WA82 (1987-1990), he took up a central role in heavy-ion experiments WA85 (1990-1992), WA94 (1992-1993) and WA97 (1993-1996). In WA85 he devised a new analysis technique for the reconstruction of strange particle decays that allowed – for the first time in nucleusnucleus collisions – the extraction of a signal from the decay of the rare, triply-strange Ω- particles and provided the first evidence for a substantial enhancement of the abundance of these particles in nucleus-nucleus collisions with respect to elementary collisions. He has served as Contactperson for both the WA94 and the WA97 experiments. In WA94 he was responsible for the operation of the Silicon Microstrip Telescope and in WA97 he coordinated all the set-up and data taking phases and had a central role in the data analysis. In 1996 he presented the proposal of nucleus-nucleus experiment NA57 (1996-2002), of which he has then served as Spokesperson all along, throughout the design, construction, data taking and data analysis phases. The results of the WA97 and NA57 experiments allowed establishing a distinctive pattern of enhancement in the production of strange particles in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the SPS. The enhancement increases with the strangeness content of the particle and with the centrality of the collision, up to a value of about 20 for the Ω- baryons in the most central collisions. Such observations formed one of the pillars of the 2001 announcement by CERN that a new state of matter had been observed in Pb-Pb collisions at the SPS, which displayed many of the properties expected for the Quark-Gluon Plasma.
In 1995 Federico Antinori coordinated the working group on Silicon Pixel Detectors within the ALICE Collaboration, and edited the Silicon Pixel Detector and charm particle detection sections of the ALICE Technical Proposal. He served as Project Leader of the ALICE Silicon Pixel Detector (SPD) project from 1995 to 2001. He was one of the conveners for heavyflavour detection for the preparation of the ALICE Physics Performance Report (2001-2005). From 2002 to 2006 he served as group leader of the ALICE group in Padova. From 2004 to 2010 he was convener of the ALICE Physics Working Group 3 (Heavy Flavour and Quarkonia). He served as ALICE Deputy Spokesperson for the period 2007-2008, as the experiment was making the transition from construction to operations.
From January 2009 to December 2011, Federico Antinori served as the ALICE Trigger Coordinator, with responsibility for the definition and implementation of the experiment’s trigger strategy for the first years of operation. In 2010, he was also charged with the coordination of the ALICE Heavy-Ion First Physics Task Force, with the mandate of quickly extracting the first round of results from the first LHC nucleus-nucleus run, which took place in November 2010. The task force operation was successful, leading to the publication of 5 papers in the first 7 weeks after the start of data taking.
After serving as ALICE Deputy Physics Coordinator from February to December 2011, in January 2012 Federico Antinori became the ALICE Physics Coordinator. He oversaw a reorganisation of the Physics Board, doubling the number of Physics Working Group and generally rejuvenating and diversifying the Board. During his mandate as Physics Coordinator, the collaboration has produced many of its most prominent results. In April 2016 he was elected Spokesperson of the ALICE Collaboration, for a three-year mandate due to start on 1 January 2017.