After Maria's marriage, she and Giuseppe carried out experiments on
pions. Maria worked with a
diffusion chamber and Giuseppe with a lead glass
Cherenkov counter. The majority of her research relates directly to the experiments, including interpreting the measurements and results in the search for new particles. In Maria's early works in the 1960s, she studied the
nucleon-nucleon charge exchange
scattering, recorded data on high-energy
electrodynamic processes. Her research work also tackled the phenomenon of
proton-proton
elastic scattering. In the 1990s, she investigated the design and test of a prototype gas-sampling electromagnetic
calorimeter of high
granularity and collaborated on the construction of a position-sensitive
photon detector for the
CPLEAR experiment. CPLEAR experiment aims to carry out precision measurements of
CP,
T and
CPT violation of the neutral
kaon systems. Maria's other work focused on
phenomenological aspects of particle physics. She studied the fundamental
symmetries in the neutral
kaon systems. By the measurements of interactions and
decays of neutral kaons, new and detailed information was found on
CPT invariance in time evolution and decay. The newly achieved level of precision of the experiments called into question the validity of some of the often tacitly assumed hypotheses in particle physics. Maria was also involved in the search for
CP-violation (charge-parity violation) in the
NA48 experiment. After the theory of CP-violation in the decay of neutral kaon system was experimentally confirmed, the discovery brought the
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980 to the discoverers of the theories,
James Cronin, and
Val Fitch. The discovery played an important role in helping scientists explain the dominance of
matter over
antimatter. == Personal life ==