Congratulations to Mattia Scotto, who today successfully defended his MSc thesis, by the title of “Dark Energy models featuring negative energy densities: growth of structure and novel perturbation-level signatures” (with the opponent being Prof. Albino Perego)! Mattia’s defense was outstanding, and he received top grades and honours, i.e. 110 e Lode (making me a very proud advisor, with this being the third 100 e Lode in a row for my amazing MSc students, after Davide Pedrotti and Giovanni Piccoli). In his thesis which I supervised, Mattia studied dark energy models featuring negative energy density components, including a negative cosmological constant with an evolving component with positive energy density on top, and a sign-switching cosmological constant. He studied in detail the growth of structure, late ISW effect, and signatures in the cross-correlation between CMB temperature anisotropies and galaxy clustering, finding however that current data has too low signal-to-noise for one to search for these signatures. During the same day, I also served as opponent for Arianna Balduzzi, an outstanding MSc student of Prof. Max Rinaldi who defended her thesis studying reheating and preheating in scale-invariant inflation.
