Bio

Sonia Colombo Serra was born in Biella, Italy in 1984. She graduated in physics in October 2008 and is now a first-year PhD student in the Department of Physics at the University of Turin. Her research project, developed in collaboration with Bracco Imaging S.p.A. and with the University of Pavia, is about hyperpolarized MRI contrast agent. She is particularly working on developing a DNP setup and understanding DNP principles.

Project: Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) Cellular Automaton Model

The purpose of this project is to simulate a system of nuclear and electronic spins with a cellular automaton, choosing a set of rules useful to describe nuclear-spin/nuclear-spin interactions and electron-spin/nuclear-spin interactions. Mathematica will be used to generate possible initial conditions according to a Boltzmann distribution and to study their evolution according to the selected rules. The aim of this simulation is understanding what level of polarization can be reached, how polarization propagates through the sample, and how polarization is distributed spatially if several domains appear or a uniform state is reached. The starting point is the cellular automaton version of Glauber’s kinetic Ising model.

Favorite Three-Color Cellular Automaton

Rule 4892035052343