Congratulations to Marco Bella, who today successfully defended his MSc thesis, by the title of “Multi-axion early dark energy and the Hubble tension” (with the opponent being Prof. Albino Perego)! Marco’s defense was absolutely outstanding, and he received top grades and honours, i.e. 110 e Lode (with this being the fourth 100 e Lode for my MSc students, after Davide Pedrotti, Giovanni Piccoli, and Mattia Scotto). In his thesis which I supervised together with Vivian Poulin, Marco studied multi-field axion early dark energy models, with the goal of seeing whether they can further improve over the vanilla early dark energy model in the context of the Hubble tension (as a spoiler, the answer is yes, and we are preparing a paper on the topic to appear soon, so stay tuned!), while developing and publicly releasing the mAxiCLASS Boltzmann solver. Marco will be starting his PhD later this year at UC Davis, where he will be working with Lloyd Knox. During the same day, I also served as opponent for Sara Marini and Jesa Crapella, respectively MSc students of Prof. Albino Perego and Prof. Alessandro Roggero, who discussed theses on binary neutron star mergers and non-superfluid neutron stars.
Alessandro La Sala’s BSc defense
Congratulations to Alessandro La Sala, who today successfully defended his BSc thesis (for the BSc degree in Mathematics), by the title of “Relatività Generale: uno studio della soluzione di Schwarzschild e applicazioni”, which translates to “General Relativity: a study of the Schwarzschild solution and applications” (with the opponent being Prof. Sonia Mazzucchi)! In his thesis which I supervised, Alessandro discussed some basic aspects of General Relativity, before turning to features of the Schwarzschild solution.
Andrea Di Pompeo's BSc defense
Congratulations to Andrea Di Pompeo, who today successfully defended his BSc thesis, by the title of “Correlazioni EPR in spaziotempo curvo”, which translates to “EPR correlations in curved spacetime” (with the opponent being Prof. Max Rinaldi)! In his thesis which I supervised, Andrea discussed the effects of spacetime curvature on non-local quantum correlations between entangled pairs of spins, with a focus on Bell-type correlations (and in particular CHSH correlations), a work far from trivial for a BSc student.
Visit by Kevin Croker
For the rest of the month we have the great pleasure of hosting Kevin Croker, currently an Assistant Research Scientist at Arizona State University. Kevin is especially well known for his work on cosmologically coupled black holes. He will be delivering a few lectures on the topic, specifically on constrained variations and their impact on cosmological dynamics. Welcome Kevin!
Teaching restarts today
Today my teaching duties restart once more! For the rest of the semester I’m looking at an extremely busy schedule (as detailed on my office door) where I’ll once again be teaching Classical Thermodynamics for the Mathematics BSc, Relativity for the Physics BSc, and Modern Cosmology for the Physics MSc. During these busy months I’m basically guaranteed to do almost no research, so hopefully my collaborators will understand 🤪 As in previous years, all my teaching material will be made publicly available on the English and Italian versions of my teaching page.
BAO and Hubble tension no-go theorem paper published in PRD!
My paper with Davide Pedrotti, Luis Escamilla, Valerio Marra, and Leandros Perivolaropoulos, where we show that the “Hubble tension no-go theorem” forbidding purely post-recombination solutions is robust against a possible miscalibration of BAO measurements, while highlighting the very important role of unanchored SNeIa (see this earlier news item), has now officially been published in PRD, where it has been selected as an Editors’ Suggestion (see this earlier news item)! The full bibliographic coordinates for the paper are Phys. Rev. D 113 (2026) 043507. Here is the link to the paper (which is published Open Access).
Edvig Selimaj joins my group!
Today Edvig Selimaj officially joins my group, and will be carrying out his Master’s thesis under the supervision of myself and Miguel Sabogal. We plan to work on non-parametric reconstructions of the expansion history in light of state-of-the-art cosmological datasets, and then apply a number of machine learning methods to these reconstructions to learn more about dark energy. Welcome Edvig, and I’m looking forward to our work together!
Gruppo 2003
As of today, I’m honored to be a member of Gruppo 2003! This is a group which brings together some of the most influential Italian scientists (including for instance Giorgio Parisi, here is the full list of members), with the aim of improving the far from ideal situation of scientific research in Italy. The group is also responsible for the online journal Scienza in Rete, and holds a certain political influence. Needless to say I’m honored to have been invited to join the group, and I hope I’ll be able to give my contribution to improving the state of research in Italy!
Congratulations to Marco Bella!
Congratulations to Marco Bella, who has been offered a PhD position at UC Davis, where he is expected to work with Lloyd Knox! Congratulations Marco, good luck with this upcoming chapter, I can think of few people in whose hands you’d be better placed than Lloyd!
BAO and Hubble tension no-go theorem paper selected as Editors' Suggestion in PRD!
My paper with Davide Pedrotti, Luis Escamilla, Valerio Marra, and Leandros Perivolaropoulos, on the implications of a possible BAO miscalibration for the Hubble tension (see this earlier news item), recently accepted for publication in PRD, has also been selected as an Editors’ Suggestion! These make up a small fraction of outstanding papers judged by PRD’s Editors as being particularly important, interesting, and well written, and are highlighted on the journals’ homepage. Great news for a paper which I do not hesitate to place among the top 3 most important papers I ever wrote!
BAO and Hubble tension no-go theorem paper accepted in PRD!
My paper with Davide Pedrotti, Luis Escamilla, Valerio Marra, and Leandros Perivolaropoulos, where we show that the “Hubble tension no-go theorem” forbidding purely post-recombination solutions is robust against a possible miscalibration of BAO measurements, while highlighting the very important role of unanchored SNeIa (see this earlier news item), has been accepted for publication in PRD! Compared to the earlier version there were very minor changes to Fig. 5 and Fig. 10. You can read the preprint version of our paper on arXiv: 2510.01974.
L'Adige piece on influential researchers in Trento
Today l’Adige, the main regional newspaper of Trentino-Alto Adige, wrote a piece (available only in their printed version) on the most influential researchers at the University of Trento, motivated by Ioannidis’ top 2% scientists “ranking” (covered, with all the very relevant caveats, in this earlier news item - the specific ranks should really be taken with a cauldron of salt!), with my name among those explicitly highlighted together with Nicola Segata, Lorenzo Bruzzone, Eleuterio Francisco Toro, and Silvia Gherardi. A scan of the article is available here.
Primordial regular black holes (part 3) paper published in PRD!
My paper with Marco Calzà, Davide Pedrotti, and Guan-Wen Yuan, which represents the third chapter in the primordial regular black holes saga (see this earlier news item), has now officially been published in PRD! The full bibliographic coordinates for the paper are Phys. Rev. D 112 (2025) 124015. Here is the link to the paper.
Visit by Francesca Vidotto
Today we have the pleasure of hosting Francesca Vidotto, visiting us from Madrid! Francesca is currently a senior researcher at IEM-CSIC, and is a recognized expert on (loop) quantum gravity. She will be delivering a talk by the title of “All you wanted to know about black hole remnants and never dared to ask”. Welcome Francesca!
Hawking radiation from regular black holes paper published in PRD!
My paper with Marco Calzà and Max Rinaldi, where we study Hawking radiation from regular black holes in the presence of a non-minimal scalar-curvature coupling (see this earlier news item), has now officially been published in PRD! The full bibliographic coordinates for the paper are Phys. Rev. D 112 (2025) 104055. Here is the link to the paper.
Visit by Marc Sarzi
Today we have the pleasure of hosting Marc Sarzi, visiting us from the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium. He works on extragalactic astronomy, particularly regarding integral-field spectroscopy aimed at studying the ionized gas content of nearby galaxies. He will be delivering a talk by the title of “Probing Environmental Drivers of Galaxy Evolution in the Fornax Cluster”. Welcome Marc!
Pietro Fracca's BSc defense
Congratulations to Pietro Fracca, who today successfully defended his BSc thesis, by the title of “A beginner’s introduction to the ΛCDM cosmological model” (with the opponent being Prof. Valter Moretti)! In his thesis which I supervised, Pietro reviewed and showed the effects of the 6 ΛCDM cosmological parameters on the main cosmological observables (CMB and matter power spectrum), a work far from trivial for a BSc student.
Primordial regular black holes (part 3) paper accepted in PRD!
My paper with Marco Calzà, Davide Pedrotti, and Guan-Wen Yuan, which represents the third chapter in the primordial regular black holes saga (see this earlier news item), has been accepted for publication in PRD! Compared to the earlier version there were minor changes to further discuss the cosmological and astrophysical role of PBHs, such as the regular ones (ZLMY PBHs) we study. You can read the preprint version of our paper on arXiv: 2507.02396.
Visit by Michael Zantedeschi
Today we have the pleasure of hosting Michael Zantedeschi, visiting us from the University of Pisa! Michael is currently a postdoc at the University of Pisa, and years ago was a student at the University of Trento, after which he did his PhD in Munich with Gia Dvali. He is a recognized expert on the topic of black holes, especially the memory burden effect, which he was one of the first to seriously work on. He will be delivering a talk precisely on the topic by the title of “Evaporating black holes: how the burden of their memory stabilizes them”. Welcome Michael!
Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers 2025 list
I’m beyond honored to have been included in the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers 2025 list! Each year, this award by Clarivate recognizes those who over the past eleven years have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their fields of research, roughly including the top 0.1% of the most influential researchers. Out of 104 total researchers based in Italian institutions, this year as many as 7 researchers from the University of Trento made it into the list, which is one of the highest figures in Italy, itself rather impressive considering we are a medium-sized University: see this UniTrentoMag piece. While this award officially recognizes the impact of my research, I stress that this would not have been possible without the contribution of my outstanding collaborators, so a huge thanks to all of them, including my amazing research group in Trento!
