Rita Antonietti is a postdoctoral researcher (adiunkt) in the Medical Physics and Radiation Detectors Group. Her research focuses on experimental particle physics, radiation detectors, and direct searches for dark matter.
She received her Ph.D. in Physics from Roma Tre University (Italy) in 2025. Her doctoral research, carried out within the CYGNO Collaboration at the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS), focused on the characterization and performance of a large-volume gaseous Time Projection Chamber (TPC) prototype for directional dark matter searches. She contributed to detector commissioning, gas and slow-control systems, calibration, data acquisition, and the development of analysis tools to evaluate the detector sensitivity to nuclear recoils induced by Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). Her Ph.D. thesis was awarded the ARAP Prize for its contribution to dark matter research.
Before starting her Ph.D., she held two research fellowships at the INFN National Laboratories of Frascati, where she worked on the characterization and long-term stability of the CYGNO LIME prototype during its commissioning.
During her Master’s studies at Sapienza University of Rome, she joined the MEG II experiment at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Switzerland, first as a summer student and later as a Master’s student. Her research focused on the gas gain performance of the Cylindrical Drift Chamber and on the optimization of front-end electronics for positron tracking in searches for the lepton-flavour-violating decay μ → eγ.
Since joining Astrocent in 2025, she has been involved in the development and characterization of radiation detectors for medical physics applications and collaborates with the DarkSide Collaboration on liquid argon detector technologies for rare-event searches.