Francesca Caloro

In recent years, I’ve worked on momentum-space conformal field theory, Feynman integral representations, and hypergeometric functions. Alongside research, I’ve cultivated a deep interest in teaching—an activity that is both intellectually rigorous and creatively rewarding, with real social impact. This passion led me to become a teaching Lecturer in the Department of Physics.  

More broadly, I’m fascinated by symmetries and their breaking in different subjects, from physics to Bach's scores! 

My research activity has focused on different areas of theoretical (particle) physics. 
At the Università del Salento and at the Institut de Physique Nucléaire (IPN) in Orsay, I worked on a low-energy physics problem, studying spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking—a phenomenon at the heart of baryon mass formation. I explored the scenario in which Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) in the limit of three massless quarks is close to a phase transition, as a function of the number of massless flavours, which would enhance the role of the vacuum fluctuations of the quark-antiquark condensate. 

During my PhD at Newcastle University, I shifted focus to high-energy physics, studying momentum-space conformal field theory, Feynman integrals, and special functions. I studied conformal correlation functions of particular interest in inflationary cosmology. Such correlators depend on physical parameters and are often expressed as integrals of difficult evaluation. I explored the interplay between integral representations and operators acting on such integrals to shift their parameters by using insights from the physics of electrical circuits and advanced mathematics including algebraic geometry. I derived new parametric integral representations of n-point conformal scalar correlators and introduced the GKZ formalism for generalised hypergeometric functions to evaluate cosmological correlators. 

I believe that one factor common to the different types of teaching, and the most striking to me, is the opportunity to create connections. The connection among different subjects, contents within the same subject and minds. 

At the University of Bath, I’ve been teaching scientific computing across various programming languages and designing a course about the formal mathematical language of symmetry—an essential foundation for further theoretical physics studies. I supervise BSc and MSc projects on topics ranging from the Path Integral formulation of quantum mechanics to novel approaches to Feynman integrals and cosmological correlators using the GKZ formalism. 

I find it deeply rewarding to supervise undergraduate and postgraduate research projects. Recently, one of my students secured a PhD position —an exciting step forward in their academic journey.