Today and tomorrow Trento is hosting the usual Christmas meeting of the INFN FLAG iniziativa specifica, and on the occasion I will be giving a talk on “Five brief lessons on the Hubble tension” (whose slides you can find here). The meeting is typically held in Bologna just before Christmas, but this year it takes place in Trento under exceptional circumstances. Looking forward to seeing many familiar faces again (including our high-profile guest speaker and former Trento student Marco Peloso!), and to a nice dinner at Trattoria Piedicastello!
Visit by Marc Schneider
We’re excited to welcome our latest visitor: Marc Schneider from SISSA! Marc is currently a postdoc at SISSA, where he has been doing a lot of interesting work especially on the possibility that singularities in GR may be somewhat tamed once quantum effects are taken into account, at which point fields and stress-energy tensor should be treated more as distributions than functions. Marc will be delivering a seminar at TIFPA by the title of “Probing the Big Bang with Quantum Fields”. He already delivered a very interesting talk on the subject at the XXV SIGRAV conference, and I look forward to hearing more and discussing these ideas in a more informal setting. Welcome Marc!
Congratulations to Davide Pedrotti!
Congratulations to Davide Pedrotti, who has won one of the highly competitive “free topic” PhD positions at the University of Trento, financed by INFN! Davide will begin his position at the start of November, and will keep working within our group. Congratulations Davide, and looking forward to continuining working together!
Associated to TIFPA-INFN
As of today I’m officially associated to INFN, the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics. I’m associated through our local TIFPA center, which stands for “Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications”. In particular, I’ll be a member of the FLAG Iniziativa Specifica, which stands for “Quantum Fields in Gravity, Cosmology and Black Holes”, and focuses on a number of themes which include early-Universe cosmology and black hole physics. Looking forward to many interesting discussions which will come out of this, especially from FLAG!
