Very happy to see my latest paper with Guan-Wen Yuan, Anne Davis, Maurizio Giannotti, Luca Visinelli, and Julia Vogel out on arXiv - kudos to Guan-Wen who did all the heavy lifting! This paper is essentially a merger of two previous papers of mine: in 2021 Luca, Anne, and I argued that dark matter direct detection experiment such as XENON1T could detect chameleons, light particles potentially related to dark energy, produced in the Sun (see paper in PRD), whereas later in 2024 some of us drastically improved the model for solar chameleon production, which was previously grossly incomplete to say the least (see paper in PRD and this earlier news item). What we did here was to combine the tools built in these two papers, applying the results to newer and much more sensitive data from XENONnT, and confirming the extremely important message that terrestrial dark matter experiments are well suited to probe screened dark energy at no extra experimental cost. We clarified various previously unclear points, and derived a new upper limit on a combination of chameleon couplings (specifically the conformal coupling to photons and the disformal coupling to electrons), valid for essentially all values of the chameleon power-law index n, making it one of the most widely applicable chameleon bounds to date. You can read the results in the preprint we just posted on arXiv: 2511.01655.
Screened dark energy and non-local quantum correlations paper published in PRD!
My paper with Fabiano Feleppa and Gaetano Lambiase, where we study non-local Bell-type quantum correlations between pairs of entangled particles within screened dark energy models (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) 084011. Here is the link to the paper.
Screened dark energy and non-local quantum correlations paper accepted in PRD!
My paper with Fabiano Feleppa and Gaetano Lambiase, where we study non-local Bell-type quantum correlations between pairs of entangled particles within screened dark energy models (see this earlier news item), has been accepted for publication without changes in PRD! You can read the preprint version of our paper on arXiv: 2508.18448.
Screened dark energy and non-local quantum correlations
Very happy to see my latest preprint with Fabiano Feleppa and Gaetano Lambiase from the University of Salerno finally out on the arXiv - kudos to Fabiano who did all the heavy-lifting and an excellent job! We focused on so-called screened dark energy/modified gravity models, where the would-be fifth force associated to a new light scalar degree of freedom responsible for cosmic acceleration is dynamically suppressed through, you guessed it, screening mechanisms, such as the chameleon, symmetron, and dilaton ones. We showed that these mechanisms can leave their imprint in non-local Bell-type correlations between pairs of entangled particles, leading to potential new observational signatures in currently unconstrained regions of parameter space. These will not be easy to detect, but if anything that’s a challenge for future generations of experimentalists! You can read our results in the preprint we just posted on arXiv: 2508.18448.
Visit by Michael Zantedeschi
This week we have Michael Zantedeschi, currently a postdoc at the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (in the group of Luca Visinelli), visiting us for a couple of days. Michael is actually not new to Trento, having been an undergrad here (although he arrived just after I finished my undergrad, so we never overlapped). While we aren’t directly working together (yet), we will be brainstorming ideas related to screened dark energy, as well as the mysterious cosmological constant. Welcome Michael!