Ludovica Aperio Bella 's research focuses on the physics of fundamental particles and forces at high energies. One of the outstanding mysteries is the mechanism by which particles acquire mass. The theory of gauge symmetry has been very successful in describing the known fundamental forces; however this theory is obviously incomplete because it requires all particles to be massless. In the summer 2012 both the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations reported a 5σ
excess of events in their 2011 and 2012 datasets of proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energy √s = 7 TeV and √s = 8 TeV at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in Geneva. The decays to pairs of vector bosons whose net electric charge is zero identify the new particle as a neutral boson. Moreover, the
observation in the diphoton channel disfavours the spin-1 hypothesis. Ludovica interests are mainly focused on the studies of this new particle because although the current results are compatible with the hypothesis of the Standard Model Higgs boson, more data and detailed studies are needed to assess its nature in detail