Delia Tosi

Scientist III / Polar Instrumentation Specialist

Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center  (WIPAC)
University of Wisconsin, Madison

222 West Washington Avenue, Suite 500
Madison, WI 53703

office: 608-263-2067
delia.tosi@icecube.wisc.edu

 

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

After receiving an undergrad degree in electrical engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, I moved to astrophysics and to Germany for graduate school at DESY and the Humboldt Universität. There I worked on the South Pole Acoustic Test Setup (SPATS), an array of acoustic transmitters and receivers designed to measure the acoustic properties of South Pole ice. In particular my thesis (Humbold link to thesis) focused on an acoustic retrievable transmitter, which we designed, built and successfully used to measure the acoustic attenuation length. The project was developed within the IceCube neutrino telescope, to investigate the feasibility of acoustic detection of astrophysical neutrinos.

 

I then spent a year at UC Berkeley working with Prof. P. Buford Price and Dr. Ryan Bay. We logged boreholes at the South Pole and at Dome C to detect dust and volcanic ash layers which allow for the reconstruction of paleoclimate records. We also scanned several ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica to study the microbial content through observation of fluorescence at different wavelengths, and investigated the possibility of tagging microbes in several thousands year old ice using flow cytometry.

 

 

From February 2011 until August 2013 I was a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Giorgio Gratta at Stanford University. I worked on the Enriched Xenon Observatory (EXO), an experiment for the search of neutrino-less double beta decay, located at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.  In 2012-2013 I was technical coordinator for the experiment, supervising operations on site.

 

Since September 2013 I have been a scientist at WIPAC in Madison, WI. As a polar instrumentation specialist, I work in some of the most extreme environments on Earth, with 11 field seasons across both hemispheres. At the South Pole, I lead the installation of the IceCube Upgrade strings, advancing one of the world’s premier neutrino observatories. In Greenland, I direct drilling operations for the Radio Neutrino Observatory in Greenland, enabling the development of the next generation of detectors in ice.  

 

 

 

Background

 

•   BS (2003) and a MS (2006) in electrical engineering at Politecnico di Milano.

•   PhD in Physics (2010) at the Humboltd Universität in Berlin, Germany

•   Postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley (2011)

•   Postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University (2011-2013)

•   Scientist at WIPAC (2013 - present)

 

 

 

Recent talks & posters

 

•   The Radio Neutrino Observatory in Greenland: Design and Construction
XX International Workshop on Neutrino Telescopes, Venice, October 2023

 

•   The Radio Neutrino Observatory in Greenland: Design and Construction
SCAR AAA, Svalbard, September 2023

 

•   The IceCube Upgrade
SCAR AAA, Courmayer, Italy

 

•   Instrumentation for the Scintillator Upgrade of IceTop 
International Conference on the Advancement of Silicon Photomultipliers, Schwetzingen, Germany, June 2018 

•   Down-going neutrinos and a next-generation surface array for IceCube
Invited Seminar at Georgia Tech, January 2017

 

•   Astrophysical neutrinos: IceCube highlights
10^th Cosmic Ray International Seminar, Ischia, Naples, Italy, July 2016

 

•   Enhanced sensitivity to astrophysical neutrinos with a surface veto array above IceCube
TeV Particle Astrophysics 2015 – Tokyo, Japan, October 2015

 

•   Calibrating the photon detection efficiency in IceCube
Third Technology and Instrumentation in Particle Physics (TIPP) conference, Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 2014

•   The search for neutrino-less double beta decay
14^th Conference on Astroparticle, Particle, Space Physics and Detectors for Physics Applications (ICATPP), Como, Italy, October 2013

•   Latest results from EXO-200
Pontecorvo 100 Symposium, Pisa, Italy, September 2013

 

•   Search for neutrino-less double beta decay with EXO-200
KIPAC Tea Talk, Stanford University, June 2013

•   Search for neutrino-less double beta decay with EXO-200
Nuclear / Particle / Astro / Cosmo (NPAC) Forum, University of Wisconsin, Madison, April 2013

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•   Double beta decay with EXO-200

11^th Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics (CIPANP), Florida, June 2012