Yesterday I found out, to my great delight that a proposal for a medium-small grant I applied to from the Blanceflor Foundation has received funding! (so now you know what this “proposal” mentioned in my earlier busy note was about - the “application” mentioned is still pending)
The Blanceflor Foundation, officially the The Foundation Blanceflor Boncompagni Ludovisi, née Bildt, is a private foundation named after lady Blanceflor (read more about her here) whose aim is to provide medium-small research grants for young (read: under-33) Italian and Swedish researchers, to fund research in one of the following countries: Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, UK or USA.“ This is not dissimilar to the mission of the Della Riccia Foundation. Previous Blanceflor awardees in my field, or neighboring fields, include Licia Verde, Caterina Doglioni, and Marco Scalisi (and probably many others I have not been able to track).
Over the course of 1 year, this grant will fund my project entitled Direct Detection of Dark Energy (acronym: DECODE - I did spend quite a bit figuring out this one!). As the name suggests, the aim of this project is to study the possibility of directly detecting dark energy (DE) quanta, or more precisely non-gravitational signatures of DE. Most (but not all) of the conventional DE searches rely on searching for gravitational signatures of DE - think for instance of cosmological constraints on the DE equation of state, and so on. One of my current research goals is to establish whether we can successfully “detect” (in a loose sense) DE quanta using a variety of cosmological and terrestrial observations. The questions I want to address in DECODE are outlined below.
Some of these questions I’ve already started addressing in recent works, including 1911.12374 and 2103.15834. However, there is still much which needs to be done, in a more systematic way, and this is one of my medium-to-long-term research goals. My general feeling is that a lot of the current searches for new physics from a wide variety of probes can be reinterpreted in terms of constraints on DE, which I believe can be much tighter than existing ones.
Many of these are, of course, speculative ideas, somewhat outside-of-the-box, and with a relatively high risk factor. However, I’ve always thought that now is the time in my career to take these sort of risks and think big and medium-to-long term (to the extent that the precariousness of non-tenured positions in academia allows it - something I am only too aware of, as I already need to apply for my subsequent position the coming fall).