About
I was born in A Coruña, North-west Spain, although my family has roots in Castille, Santander and the Basque Country.
I studied Physics at the University of Santiago de Compostela and Universidad Autonóma de Madrid, where I graduated in Theoretical Physics. But soon after graduating I switched to experimental particle physics. I did my PhD at the Weizmann Institute in Israel after a one-year stint at the IAC, the Astrophysics Institute of the Canary Islands.
My PhD thesis dealt with the search for quark-gluon plasma in collisions of relativistic heavy ions (NA45/CERES experiment at CERN in Geneva). The quark-gluon plasma is a hot and dense state of matter where not even atomic nuclei and particles like neutrons and protons exist as entities, but the system is a "soup" of the elementary quarks and gluons. This is a state that the Universe went through just after a few microseconds after its begining. Several experiments worldwide tried at that time (mid 1990's) to recreate this state by colliding large nuclei at relativistic energies in order to better understand the early evolution of the Universe. The NA45/CERES experiment detected the first hints of the creation of the quark-gluon plasma, but could not certified with certainty that it had created it. It was an exciting time to be in the field of heavy nuclei collisions. Evidence for the production of quark-gluon plasma came a few years later from CERN.
But at that time I had already moved on. At the end of my PhD there was another exciting field comming of age: neutrino astronomy. That is that precisely: to use neutrinos as messengers from the far corners of the Universe. And I had the opportunity to come to Uppsala with a Marie Curie postdoctoral grant from the European Union to join one of the pioneer experiments in the field, the AMANDA neutrino telescope at the South Pole. And the rest is history: I am doing neutrino astronomy since then, first in AMANDA and then in the IceCube collaborations. Follow the RESEARCH link in the menu above for more details on my interests within IceCube.
I am also involved in the PTOLEMY project, a fascinating and devishly difficult effort to detect the relic neutrinos that permeate the Universe from about one second after its begining. The extremely low cross section of neutrinos with matter makes such measurement really challenging. But not impossible, and this is what PTOLEMY is trying to achieve. The RESEARCH page has more details on my scientific int erests.