Congratulations to Giovanni Piccoli, who today successfully defended his MSc thesis, by the title of “The very small-scale primordial Universe: complementary tests from Cosmic Neutrinos and Gravitational Waves” (with the opponent being Prof. Alessandro Roggero)! Giovanni’s defense was simply outstanding, and he received top grades and honours, i.e. 110 e Lode. In his thesis which I supervised, Giovanni developed complementary tests of the small-scale power spectrum of primordial fluctuations using the stochastic gravitational wave background measured by pulsar timing arrays, and forecasting the reach in this sense of a potential future measurement of the cosmic neutrino background (CNB) from laboratory experiments. What does the CNB have to do with the small-scale power spectrum? We’re writing up a paper based on Giovanni’s results, and I can guarantee it will be extremely exciting, so no spoilers!
Leonardo Comini joins my group!
More members joining my group (and more to come soon)! Today Leonardo Comini has officially begun his Master’s thesis work under my supervision, where he will be studying what a particular class of early JWST observations have to say about ΛCDM. Welcome Leonardo, looking forward to our work together!
Mattia Scotto joins my group!
My group keeps expanding, and now includes Mattia Scotto as well! He will be working on his Master’s thesis under my supervision, where we plan on studying various cosmological signatures of dark energy models featuring a negative cosmological constant (perfect timing given today’s new preprint!), and how the signatures we will find can help us distinguish these models from the cosmological constant of ΛCDM. Welcome Mattia, and I’m looking forward to our work together!
Davide Pedrotti's MSc defense
Congratulations to Davide Pedrotti, who today successfully defended his MSc thesis, by the title of “Studies on Quasi-Normal Modes and Shadows of Black Holes” (with the opponent being Prof. Albino Perego)! Davide’s defense was outstanding (one of the committee members, a condensed matter physicist, said: “This is the first talk on black holes I’ve understood in years”), and in fact he received top grades and honours, i.e. 110 e Lode. In his thesis, supervised by myself and Prof. Kostas Kokkotas at the University of Tübingen, Davide studied quasi-normal modes and shadows of a number of well-motivated BH metrics beyond GR, and in particular investigated the non-trivial correspondence between the two for metrics describing rotating regular BHs: part of his thesis will be written up in a paper in the coming months, so stay tuned! During the same day, I also served as opponent for an MSc student of Prof. Bill Weber. Davide will now be enjoying a few days of deserved break before starting hiw new adventure as a PhD student in Trento in November.
Teaching restarts today
Today my teaching duties restart again. Fortunately this semester I’ll have a much lighter load, both because I’ll only be teaching one course (again Advanced Topics in Theoretical Physics, following the same program as last semester), and obviously because I already delivered the same course previously. Last semester’s course was a great success and was truly satisfying, with a number of excellent students attending (many of which will end up doing their MSc theses with me), so I hope this semester will be as successful. And there will definitely be much more time for research this time! Once more, all my teaching material will be made publicly available, while being regularly updated, on the English and Italian versions of my teaching page.
Giovanni Piccoli joins my group!
My group is expanding, and as of today includes also Giovanni Piccoli. He will be working on his Master’s thesis under my supervision, and we plan to explore novel cosmological and terrestrial tests of the (very) small-scale matter power spectrum - no spoilers, you’ll have to wait and see what we come up with! Welcome Giovanni, and looking forward to our work together!
New (first) group member!
Today Davide Pedrotti joins my group as a new Master’s student. Davide is enrolled in the Trento-Tübingen Double Degree, and will be jointly supervised by me in Trento, and by Prof. Kostas Kokkotas in Tübingen. While the finer details remain to be defined, Davide’s thesis will be on the topic of quasi-normal modes of black holes beyond GR, their use in testing gravity, and potentially their connection to black hole shadows. Welcome Davide, and looking forward to our work together!