Francesco Piacentini

Instrument support scientist
Planck Science Office

I work in the Planck Science Office as Instrument support
scientist. My field of interest is Observational Cosmology and in
particular the Cosmic Microwave Background and instrumentation.

When I started in the field, about 10 years ago, there was a large 
discrepancy between observations and theoretical predictions for
what concerns  the amount of matter and energy in the Universe. The
inflationary model  was predicting a certain critical density,
while the luminous matter was  about 5% of that, and also including
dark matter only about 30% of the  critical density was measured.
The most promising tool to solve this mystery was the direct
observation  of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation,
the oldest and most  far away observable radiation. I joined the
team that was developing the BOOMERANG instrument, a  telescope
for CMB to be flown on a stratospheric balloon. Soon after I was
sent to the US for a technological flight and then to Antarctica
for  the Scientific flight in 1998. BOOMERANG was a success and
provided the  first map of the CMB with high signal-to-noise ratio.
The total density  of matter and radiation was found to be equal to
the critical value  expected according to the inflationary model.
The large scale curvature  of the Universe was shown to be flat.
BOOMERANG was flown again in 2003 to measure the polarization of
the CMB and it was again a success.

The natural evolution of BOOMERANG is the HFI instrument in Planck,
and here  I am.