Abstract: Enabling communication between quantum devices, such as clocks, computers, and simulators has the potential to significantly enhance the capabilities of their applications, such as quantum sensing and computing. The key to achieving this lies in establishing efficient communication channels among these quantum devices even over a long distance, which involves the exchange of qubits encoded in light at telecom wavelengths through optical fibers. In this context, I will present an overview of the new experiment that we are building in Florence, which focuses on interfacing single photons at telecom wavelengths with individual neutral ytterbium atoms trapped in optical tweezers. By leveraging the unique properties of the ytterbium clock state and its telecom transitions, our objective is to interface a long-lived ”matter” qubit and resonant light, including atom-resonant heralded single photons or photons forming entangled pairs. I will discuss the first developments, the motivation for exploring this research line and its impact as a crucial foundation for distributing entanglement between light and matter.

Abstract: HEP data analysis depends on high-fidelity detector simulators used to translate sensor-level information into physics variables of interest. In this seminar, I will discuss how differentiable simulations allow us to rethink traditional HEP workflows by making simulation parameters directly tuneable through gradient-based optimisation. I will introduce LUCiD, an end-to-end differentiable simulation framework for optical particle detectors. LUCiD matches the performance of established non-differentiable software for Super-Kamiokande while substantially simplifying traditional workflows and enabling new analysis strategies. Moreover, the principles behind LUCiD can be readily adapted to both Cherenkov and scintillation detectors across a wide range of scales, allowing the same framework to model experiments ranging from WCTE, IWCD, Super-Kamiokande, and Hyper-Kamiokande to JUNO and neutrino telescopes such as KM3NeT and IceCube.
The continued development of simulation and inference techniques also depends critically on well-documented public datasets that enable method development, reproducibility, and meaningful comparisons through common benchmarks. As an open-source framework, LUCiD can generate realistic simulated events across different detector technologies and experimental configurations. In the seminar, I will also discuss ongoing efforts to produce large-scale public datasets spanning unprecedented detector diversity and label richness, with the goal of fostering community-wide advances in detector calibration and event reconstruction.

Abstract: What if the symmetries of nature are not inputs but outputs, emergent consequences of quantum information theory? In 2017, we showed that demanding maximal entanglement in high-energy scattering processes reproduces the structure of QED and places non-trivial constraints on the weak mixing angle, hinting at a deep connection between quantum information and the laws of particle physics. Since then, this program has grown into a vibrant field: entanglement extremization is now linked to the emergence of symmetries across QCD, the Higgs sector, and flavor physics, while novel quantum resources such as magic-state complexity are revealing new organizing patterns behind the Standard Model. Strikingly, these are no longer purely theoretical constructs: ATLAS and CMS have observed quantum entanglement in top-quark pairs at the LHC, Bell inequality violations have been detected in charmonium and B meson decays, and quantum magic in top quarks has been measured for the first time, turning particle colliders into quantum information laboratories. In this talk, I will survey this landscape and outline a research vision that combines quantum information theory, high-energy phenomenology, and quantum computing to ask: can the fundamental interactions emerge from information-theoretic first principles?

Abstract: The existence of primordial black holes can be probed through the gravitational waves generated during their formation and subsequent evolution. In this talk, we will explore different frequency ranges and the corresponding experiments designed to test their existence.