FRASCATI NATIONAL LABORATORIES: FROM HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS TO INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Interview with Fabio Bossi, newly elected director of Frascati National Laboratories and former director of the INFN division in Lecce.

The Frascati National Laboratories (LNF) complex is the first, in terms of size and age, of the four INFN National Laboratories. It has taken on the role of forerunner in particle collider research worldwide since its inception, with the pioneering Ada and Adone, also sowing the seeds for the development of the large colliders at CERN in Geneva, which saw the laying of the foundation stone in the same years. Since 2000, LNF has hosted DAFNE, the collider, still operating, that holds the world record for low energy instantaneous brightness.
The technical and scientific expertise of the LNF in the field of accelerators is unique in Italy and competitive in Europe. Thanks to the broad spectrum of expertise put in place to pursue fundamental physics objectives, activities complementary to research in high energy physics have grown, including the study of condensed matter, the study of new detectors, medical and space applications, radiation dosimetry and environmental control, computer network management and the construction of advanced computing centres. A vital part of the Laboratories is the the SPARC free-electron laser, built in collaboration with ENEA and CNR, and the very high-power FLAME laser for the study of innovative particle acceleration techniques.
Fabio Bossi, former director of the INFN division in Lecce, has been appointed as the new director of the Frascati National Laboratories, taking over from Pierluigi Campana who has managed the structure since 2015 and who, at the beginning of 2020, was appointed as a supervisory member of the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research, on the INFN Executive Board.
Fabio Bossi, from Rome, is an elementary particle experimental physicist. He has worked at CERN and LNF on electron-positron collision experiments. He has also been involved in precision measurements of the Standard Model, flavour physics and light dark matter research. He was head of the KLOE-2 collaboration at the LNF Dafne accelerator and head of the Research Division of the Laboratories themselves. We asked him, as the newly appointed director, to tell us how he sees the LNF in the near future.

How does it feel to move from managing the INFN division in Lecce to managing the largest of the INFN laboratories? Beyond the human aspect, which was extraordinary, the four-year period in Lecce was an excellent training ground for me to understand many aspects of the management of the Institute that I only partially knew. Certainly, the big step towards LNF is a great challenge not only because of the size of the structure, but also because running a National Laboratory also means ...

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