Maria Gabriella Castellano

Born: Orvieto (Italy), February 24th, 1956

Education: Laurea in Physics, 1978;

Position: First researcher of the CNR (National Research Council) since April 1982

Field of research :
super conducting Josephson devices

Short curriculum
from 1978 to 1991, I worked in the Rome gravitational wave experiment ROG . This experiment, started in the 70s under the guide of Edoardo Amaldi, aims to the direct detection of gravitational waves, emitted by cosmic events such as Supernovae, by observation of the effects on a resonant massive bar. Since the gravitational wave produces only a tiny change in the bar length, very sophisticated techniques have been developed to extract the signal, requiring extremely sensitive transducers and amplifiers. The dc-SQUID fabricated at IESS since the 80s is the amplifier used in all the active antennas of the Rome group, at Cern (Geneva) and INFN (Frascati). During my collaboration with the group, I was in charge of the SQUID: how to couple the antenna an the transducer to the SQUID, how to reduce noise, how to evaluate the equivalent sensitivity of the detector.

From 1991, I work at IESS, enlarging my initial interest for Jo sephson devices. I am involved in the fabrication with thin-film technologies and photolithography, in the designing and test of the devices: high-quality Josephson junctions for basic research and for astrophysical detectors (infrared bolometers, single photon optical detectors), dc-SQUIDs and SQUID arrays for magnetometry, rf-SQUIDs for quantum mechanics experiments.

I am involved in all the project of the superconducting devices group at IESS.

e-mail: mgcastellano@ifn.cnr.it